Nitronex, a leader in the design and manufacture of gallium nitride (GaN) based RF solutions for high performance applications in the defense, communications, cable TV, and industrial & scientific markets, has developed a rugged transistor technology capable of surviving the industry’s most severe robustness tests without significant device degradation. The XPT1015, based on this new rugged technology, is a 28 V, DC-3.0 GHz, 40 W power transistor with 17.5 dB small-signal gain and 65% peak drain efficiency at 2 GHz. The thermal resistance of the XPT1015 is 1.9°C/W and is amongst the lowest in the industry in this power class.

Designed from the ground up for ruggedness, the XPT1015 leverages Nitronex’s existing 28 V NRF1 process platform which has been used to ship more than 650,000 production devices, including more than 50,000 MMICs, since volume shipments began in 2009. One hundred XPT1015 devices from four wafers were subjected to a 15:1 VSWR at all phase angles with 90°C base plate temperature. During VSWR testing, all devices were operated in a saturated average power condition being driven by a 4000 carrier 200 MHz wideband signal with a 19.5 dB peak-to-average ratio. These devices showed 100% survivability and only ~0.2 dB average change in saturated output power.

“Historically there have been markets which Nitronex could not address because our products did not meet their stringent robustness requirements. We made reliability, robustness, and ruggedness a priority over the last several quarters. Our new XPT1015 is our first 28 V product explicitly designed for severe operating environments. In addition, our recently announced 48 V platform was also designed from the ground up to meet very severe environmental requirements,” said Ray Crampton, VP of Engineering. “We are excited to have expanded our addressable markets and applications by offering this new rugged technology capability.”

Nitronex’s patented SIGANTIC® GaN-on-Si process is the only production-qualified GaN process using an industry standard 4” silicon substrate. This results in a robust, scalable supply chain and positions Nitronex well for the growth expected from emerging GaN markets such as military communications, CATV, RADAR, commercial wireless, satellite communications and point to point microwave. Nitronex is currently providing prototypes to select customers and the XPT1015 is expected to be available to the broader market later this year.