The approach to the design of traveling wave amplifiers (TWAs) presented makes use of specially selected FETs. This is due to the introduction of Chebyshev or Butterworth filter theory that requires different capacitances for the individual stages. The main advantage of this method is the reduction of the ripple in the gain and especially an improvement of the reflection coefficient of the amplifiers compared to conventional designs. The application of the filter approach has been demonstrated successfully for the assumption of a unilateral FET description as well as for a more accurate transistor model. For the examples presented, the Chebyshev approach has proved to be superior to the conventional TWA design