Reliability Analysis for a GaAs LNA with Temperature Stress

In order to investigate the reliability of gallium arsenide (GaAs) monolithic microwave integrated circuit (MMIC) low noise amplifier (LNA), a series of tests have been carried out here. The results show that with the rising temperature the small-signal gain (S₂₁) decreases about 0.72 dB, output power Pout, gain and third-order intersection point (OIP3) with the reduction of 3.74 dB, 3.84 dB and 6.13 dB at 0.75 GHz, respectively. In addition, when the cycle number increase from 1 to 5, various indicators have been significantly decreased. Among them, there are some decrease of 0.79 dB, 4.88 dB and 4.99 dB for S₂₁, Pout and gain at -40 ℃ ~ 110 ℃, and 0.59 dB, 4.35 dB and 4.58 dB are dropped at -5 ℃ ~ 55 ℃. Moreover, all indicators decrease 3% with the increasing cycles. The detailed analysis shows that the degradation of LNA performance is closely related to the temperature, which provides an important theoretical basis and practical guidance for further optimizing the design of LNA and improving its reliability.