Design of an oscillator in a 0.25 μm GaN-on-SiC HEMT technology for long range remote sensing applications

© 2017 IEEE. The radar systems have been widely deployed in our daily life, from non-invasive vital sign detection to hand gesture recognition. Among these systems, there is no doubt that oscillator plays the most critical role. In this paper, design of an oscillator to achieve both high output power and low phase noise is investigated at the circuit level. A prototype oscillator is implemented in a 0.25-μm GaN-on-SiC HEMT technology. Based on the measured results, the phase noise of the designed oscillator can be achieved as low as-112 dBc/Hz and-143 dBc/Hz at 100 kHz offset and 1 MHz offset respectively from a 4.954 GHz carrier, with an output power of more than 14 dBm. Moreover, the output power can be enhanced up to 26 dBm, if a drain bias 16 V is used, while good phase noise of-132 dBc/Hz @ 1 MHz is still achievable. This work has successfully demonstrated that the oscillator designed in GaN-on-SiC HEMT technology might be very well suitable for long range remote sensing applications