This paper reports the new gate and recess structure design of millimeter-wave, high power pHEMTs, which highly improves humidity resistance and reliability. By using tantalum nitride as the refractory gate metal and a silicon nitride layer prepared by a catalytic chemical vapor deposition technique for passivation of this transistor, strong moisture resistance was obtained without degradation of the device characteristics. Moreover, we have designed a stepped recess structure to increase the on-state breakdown voltage without degradation of the power density of the millimeter-wave pHEMT, according to the analysis based on the new nonlinear drain resistance model. Consequently, the developed pHEMT has shown strong humidity resistance with no degradation of the DC characteristics even after 1000 hours storage at 400 K and 85% humidity, and the high on-state breakdown voltage of over 30 V while keeping the high power density of 0.65 W/mm in the Ka band. In addition, the proposed nonlinear drain resistance model effectively explains this power performance.

A 100 W, low distortion AlGaAs/GaAs heterostructure FET has been developed for CDMA cellular base stations. This FET employs the longest gate finger ever reported of 800 µm to shrink the chip size. The size of the chip and the package are miniaturized to 1.242.6 mm2 and 17.4 24.0 mm2, respectively. The developed FET exhibits 100 W (50 dBm) saturation output power, and 11.5 dB power gain at 1 dB gain compression at 2.1 GHz. The third-order intermodulation distortion and the power-added efficiency under the two-tone test condition (Δf=1 MHz) are -35 dBc and 24%, respectively at 42 dBm output power, that is 8 dB back off from the saturation power.