Miniaturising of K-Band Coplanar MMIC-Amplifiers by Using Lumped Elements

As MMICs become more widespread in commercial applications the costs of production gain increased attention. For the MMIC-Designer it is important to reduce the chip size, while keeping the electrical characteristics. To demonstrate which size reduction is possible using lumped elements, this paper documents the comparison of a distributed and a lumped element MMIC K-band amplifier in coplanar line technique. The distributed element amplifier is a two-stage design and needs a size of 3 mm2. In the frequency range from 18 to 20 GHz the gain is more than 12 dB. The lumped element amplifier is a three-stage design, which has a size of 1 mm2. For the same frequency range the gain is more than 23 dB.