GAAS Conference P1-136

This paper shows the results of research on the optical control of a GaAs chip monolithic amplifier, and is an extension of previous work by our group in the field of optical-microwave interaction [1-3]. The amplifier was originally designed for the transmitter stage of an indoor mobile communications system in the 2.4 GHz band. The possibilities of optical control of this amplifier are evidenced as follows: if the amplifier operates with the same biasing, the gain can be optically controlled from a condition of almost isolation, (small signal gain less than 5 dB), up to an active condition, (small signal gain greater than 10 dB), which gives a range of optical control of about 15 dB. At the same time, the optical control provides an improvement of the input and output matching in a range of 12dB and 6dB, respectively. This optical control suggests an interesting control of gain and matching for other microwave FET based active devices.