A high power active circulator using GaN MMIC power amplifiers

This paper presents a 2.4 GHz hybrid integrated active circulator consisting of three power amplifiers and three PCB-based Wilkinson power dividers. The power amplifiers were designed and fabricated in a standard 0.35-μm AlGaN/GaN HEMT technology, and combined with three traditional power dividers on FR4 using bonding wires. Due to the isolation of power dividers, the isolation between three ports is achieved; meanwhile, due to the unidirectional characteristics of the power amplifiers, the nonreciprocal transfer characteristic of the circulator is realized. The measured insertion gain of the proposed active circulator is about 2-2.7 dB at the center frequency of 2.4 GHz, the isolation between three ports is better than 20 dB over 1.2-3.4 GHz, and the output power of the designed active circulator achieves up to 20.1-21.2 dBm at the center frequency.