Power Supply Management of GaN MMIC Power Amplifiers for Pulsed Radar

Systems that incorporate highly integrated and highly sophisticated, high power radio frequency (RF) GaN power amplifiers (PAs), such as pulsed radar applications, are a constant challenge for today’s digital control and management systems to keep up with these ever increasing levels of sophistication. To compete in this market, today’s control systems must be extremely flexible, reusable, and easily adaptable to various RF amplifier architectures that can be tailored to meet the needs of the customer. These complex management systems require innovative compensation algorithms, built-in-test (BIT) features, local and remote communication interfaces, monitoring of critical system performance parameters and environmental conditions, and system fault protection. The increased complexity of these systems is driven by the demand for higher power from semiconductor-based RF systems.