UC Irvine

A novel ballast resistor network is proposed to achieve a better thermal management in HBT power cells without degrading the RF performances. Experiments were conducted on two HBT power amplifiers. They occupy same area. One is designed using conventional ballast network. The other uses proposed novel network. Temperature comparisons were made based on the same current density. Infrared camera images show that a more uniform temperature distribution is obtained in novel ballast network power amplifier. Our results demonstrate that the proposed novel ballast network has promising applications in high power amplifiers. (C) 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.