Submitted to: Dr. B.K.

Kanaujia

Submitted By: Ashwini Kumar Naresh
RF I year
Roll No. 00410100613
Microwave amplifier design
Earlier microwave devices relied on tubes, such as
klystrons and travelling wave tubes.
But due to dramatic improvements and innovations in
solid state technology that have occurred since 1970s,
most RF and microwave amplifiers today use transistor
devices.
Microwave transistor amplifiers are rugged, low cost,
reliable, and can be easily integrated with integrated
circuits.

Field Effect Transistor (FET)
Microwave field effect transistors can be used well into
millimeter range with high gain and low noise figure.
Typically used are GaAs MESFET due to desirable gain
and noise features because of high electron mobility of
GaAs compared to Si.

Ri is series gate resistance
Rds is drain to source resistance
Cgs is gate to source capacitance
Cds is drain to source capacitance
Cgd is gate to drain capacitance
gm is transconduactance
Two port power gains
Consider an arbitrary two port network as shown below,
connected to source Zs and ZL, respectively as shown
below.
We will derive expressions for three types of power gain in
terms of S parameters and reflection coefficients.



Power gain = G = PL/ Pin is the ratio of power dissipated
in load ZL to power delivered to input of two port network.

Available gain = GA = Pavn/ Pavs is the ratio of power
available from two port network to power available from
source.

Transducer Power gain = GT = PL/ Pavs is the ratio of the
power delivered to the load to power available from the
source.

Transistor amplifier circuit
A single stage microwave transistor circuit can be
modeled as shown below where a matching circuit is
used on both sides of transistor.

We can define separate effective gain factors for the
input matching network, the transistor and the output
matching network as follows:







Then overall transducer gain is GT = GSGOGL.
Stability
Two types of stability are defined:
1. Unconditional Stability: The network is
unconditionally stable if and
for all passive sources and load impedances.
2. Conditional Stability: The network is conditionally
stable if and
only for certain range of passive source and load
impedances.
Conditions for unconditional stability :




Test for unconditional Stability : K- test, where it
can be shown that a device is unconditionally stable if
Rollets condition ,defined as


Along with
Amplifier Design
1. Single Stage Transistor amplifier design
2. Broadband Transistor amplifier design
3. Power Amplifiers
Single Stage Transistor amplifier
design
(a) Design for Maximum Gain:
After stability of transistor has been determined,
stable regions for reflection coefficients of load and
source have been located, input and output
matching sections can be designed. Since Go is fixed
, overall gain is controlled by gains, Gs and GL.
Because most transistors appear as significant
mismatch, resulting frequency is narrowband.


For maximum power transfer at input network
For maximum power transfer at output network
Maximum transducer gain


Eg: circuit design and frequency response for an
amplifier for maximum gain at 4 GHz is shown below









frequency response
(b) Design for Specified Gain
In many cases it is preferable to design for less
than maximum gain to improve bandwidth or to
obtain specified values of amplifier gain.
The design is facilitated by plotting constant gain
circles on smith chart, to represent loci of relection
coefficients of source and load that give fixed
values of gain (GS and GL).
The expression for GS and GL for unilateral case


Maximum gain values are




Normalized gain factors

The results for constant gain circles are




Eg: Circuit design and frequency response for a
transistor amplifier with 11 dB gain at 4 GHz are shown
below










Fig: transducer gain and return loss
(c) Low- Noise Amplifier Design
In receiver applications, it is especially required
to have preamplifier with as low noise figure as
possible.
Generally low noise and maximum gain cant be
achieved together. Some sort of compromise has to
be made.
This is done by using constant gain circles and
circles of constant noise figures.
The noise figure of a two port amplifier is
expressed as

Using reflection coefficients instead of admittance



And the noise figure is achieved as


First we define noise figure parameter, N



The constant noise circles with centers at


And radius at

are obtained.
Eg: Circuit design for LNA at 4 GHZ and 2 dB nise
figure with maximum gain

































Constant gain and noise figure circles
2. Broadband Transistor amplifier
design
(a) Balanced amplifiers:
The balanced amplifier uses two 90 degree couplers
to cancel input and output reflections from two
identical amplifiers.
Because of phasing properties of hybrid amplifiers,
reflections from amplifier inputs cancel at the input to
hybrid, resulting in improved impedance match.











Fig: A balanced amplifier using 90 degree hybrid
couplers
Performance and optimization for a balanced
amplifier







Fig: Gain and return loss, before and after optimization
for a balanced receiver







(b) Distributed Amplifier
A cascade of N identical FETs have their gates
connected to a transmission line having a
characteristic impedance Zg, with a spacing of lg,
while the drains are connected to a transmission line
of characteristic impedance Zd, with spacing ld

Procedure of amplification:
The input signal travels down the gate line, with
each FET tapping off some input power. The
amplified output signals from FETs form a travelling
wave on drain line.





Fig: Configuration of an N-stage distributed amplifier.

The first step in analysis of distributed amplifer is to
employ unilateral version of FET equivalent circuit to
decompose the circuit as shown on next slide.









Fig: Gain versus frequency for a distributed amplifer
from 1 to 18 GHz for N= 2, 4, 8, 16stages
3. Power Amplifiers
Power amplifiers are used in final stages of radar and
radio transmitters to increase radiated power level.
Typical output powers maybe on the order of 100-500
mW for mobile or data communication systems, or in
1-100 W for radar or fixed point radio systems.
Important considerations for RF and microwave
power amplifiers are efficiency, gain, intermodulation
products and thermal effects.
Various power combining techniques in conjunction
with multiple transistors are used if higher output
powers are required.
Characteristics of Power Amplifiers and
Amplifier Classes:
The power amplifier is usually the main consumer
of DC power in most handheld power devices. Its
efficiency is important and given by ratio of RF
output power to DC input power
n= Pout/ PDC
Power amplifiers are usually designed to provide
best efficiency, even if it means resulting gain is
less than maximum possible.

Classes of amplifiers
Class A
Class B
Class C
Higher classes, such as D, E, F and S
Class A
Class A amplifiers are inherently linear circuits, where
transistor is biased to conduct over entire range of
input signal cycle.
Because of this class A amplifiers have theoretical
maximum efficiency of 50%.
Most small signal and low noise amplifiers operate as
class A circuits.

Class B
These are biased to conduct only during one half of
the input signal cycle
Usually two complementary transistors are operated in
class B push pull amplifier to provide amplification
over entire cycle.
The theoretical efficiency of class B is 78%.

Class C:
Class C amplifiers are operated with the transistor near
cut off for more than half of the input signal cycle, and
generally use a resonant circuit in the output stage to
recover the fundamental.
Class C amplifiers obtain efficiency near 100%, but can
only be used with constant envelop modulations
Higher Classes:
Classes such as D, E, F and S use transistor as a switch
to pump a highly resonant tank circuit, and may
achieve very high efficiencies.
The majority of communication transmitters at UHF
frequencies or above use class A, AB, Or B power
amplifiers because of need for low distortion products
Refrences
Microwave Engineering By David M. Pozar, Second
and Third edition
Naval University of America
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov