A talk by Dr. Asmita Dani on “Microwave and Millimeter-wave Design and Applications of GaN Pas”

Name of the Speaker: Dr. Asmita Dani

Title of the Talk: “Microwave and Millimeter-wave Design and Applications of GaN Pas”

Date & Time: 10 June, 2019 at 4 PM

Venue: Golden Jubilee Hall of ECE Department

ABSTRACT

Gallium Nitride (GaN) technology is a critical step forward for the next generation solid state electronics development to enable future communication and defense systems. GaN on SiC and GaN on Si are two of the most promising III-V semiconductor technologies which boast several advantages over existing high-power semiconductor technologies such as GaAs, Si, SiGe, etc. High power density combined with lower parasitic capacitances and high Ft/Fmax enable wider bandwidth and significantly smaller sized high-power integrated solutions for the transceiver market at both microwave and millimeter-wave frequencies using GaN technology. One of the major applications for GaN technology is high power amplifier (PA) design for sub-6 GHz commercial base-station and cellular market along with millimeter-wave high power radar transmitters for defense and aerospace industry. In this talk, a brief overview of GaN technology will be presented with basics of the technology and its advantages. The talk would also address PA basics with design considerations for GaN technology PAs. A GaN PA design from die to packaged module along with transistor device characterization techniques will be discussed along with some novel transmitter PA architectures to achieve high efficiency and linear system performance. A brief summary of current high-performance designs for GaN PAs at microwave and millimeter wave frequencies will also be presented.

Dr. Asmita Dani obtained her Ph.D. in RF/Microwave circuits and systems from the University of Colorado Boulder in December 2013. Her research was focused on simultaneously improving the efficiency and linearity of GaN PAs using second harmonic injection at the output. The main target application was for radar transmitters. Dr. Dani has published several papers with IEEE and was has been working for the past 5 years in both mid-sized and startup companies in the Bay area. She worked at Infineon Technologies Americas as an RF staff power amplifier design engineer where she was leading technology development projects on innovation of die technology using LDMOS and GaN for next generation high power RF devices in base station transmitters. She also has experience in design of Doherty PAs for base-station applications. Dr. Dani has strong skills with multi-harmonic load-pull measurement systems and is an expert in AWR MWO simulation software.

For the past year, Dr. Dani was working at a startup in Palo Alto, where she was driving innovative and cutting edge MMIC design for steerable phased arrays to be used
in millimeter wave automotive radar applications.

ALL ARE WELCOME