CAP Wireless to use GaN chips in X-band amplifier
Microwave and RF subsystem supplier CAP Wireless is to develop a 150 W GaN power amplifier (PA) under a US Air Force project.
The company, which is based in Newbury Park, CA, has been awarded $750,000 under a small business innovation research program to develop the PA, which it says will cover the entire X-band frequency range.
CAP Wireless will base the amplifier on its patent-pending "spatial combiner" technology - branded Spatium - which allows lots of chips to be combined to generate high-power amplification across a decade of bandwidth. The X-band PA development is expected to be completed by the end of 2006.
Currently using PHEMTs and FETs supplied by Hittite Microwave and TriQuint Semiconductor in its GaAs-based amplifiers, CAP Wireless will source its GaN chips from Cree. Scott Behan, the new VP of marketing at CAP Wireless, said that Cree also designed the chips that would be used in the X-band amplifier. The PA will feature 16 GaN devices in total.
Founded by GaAs industry veterans Charles Abronson and Paul Daughenbaugh, CAP Wireless has been in "stealth mode" for the past 8 years. It now employs 15 people and has an annual revenue of around $3 million, says Behan.
The Spatium technology, which was developed primarily at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is now subject to a patent infringement lawsuit filed by rival amplifier company Wavestream Corporation.
Wavestream contends that the CAP Wireless technology infringes an exclusive license that Wavestream has signed with the University of California, this time centering on a power combining method developed at the California Institute of Technology. CAP Wireless denies any such infringement.
