A MMIC power amplifier operating with a single-supply (3.0 V) has been developed for 5.8 GHz Japanese Electronic Toll Collection (ETC) System. The present MMIC contains two FETs, matching circuits (input, intermediate and output matching circuits), and two drain bias circuits. High dielectric constant material SrTiO3 (STO) is used for by-pass and input coupling capacitors. Very small die size of 0.77 mm2 has been realized by using the STO capacitors and negative feedback circuit technology. High 1 dB output gain compression point (P1dB) of 13 dBm, high gain of 21.4 dB and low dissipation current of 41.3 mA have been achieved under 3.0 V single-supply condition.

In this work, using 0.2 µm GaAs modulation doped FET (MODFET), a high performance downconverter MMIC was developed for direct broadcasting satellite (DBS) applications. The downconverter MMIC showed a noise figure of 4.3 dB which is lower by 5 dB than conventional ones, and required only a low LO power of -10 dBm for normal DBS operation. At a low LO power of -10 dBm, the power consumption was 175 mW, which is lower than 50 percent of conventional ones. The frequency response of conversion gain exhibited a low gain ripple of 0.9 dB, and the LO leakage power was suppressed to a lower value than -30 dBm under a LO input power of -10 dBm. The fabricated chip exhibited a small size of 0.840.9 mm2. The objectives of this work are to improve the traditional direct broadcasting satellite (DBS) downconverters by an efficient circuit design and to describe the techniques employed in the design.