Reliable noise modeling of GaN HEMTs for designing low‐noise amplifiers

A reliable modeling procedure is developed for extracting an equivalent circuit able to reproduce the small‐signal and noise performance of the gallium nitride (GaN) high‐electron mobility transistor (HEMT) technology. The main advantages of this model are its simplicity and straightforward extraction based on only pinch‐off scattering (S‐) parameter measurements. The validity of the achieved model is verified by the good agreement between high‐frequency experiments and simulations for three devices with different sizes. The model reliability is further confirmed by the observed good scaling of the extracted parameters. The same model is demonstrated by designing and simulating a broadband low‐noise amplifier (LNA) for 5G applications.