A 24GHz, +14.5dBm fully-integrated power amplifier in 0.18 μm CMOS

Abstract

Abstract-A 24-GHz +14.5-dBm fully integrated power amplifier with on-chip 50-input and output matching is demonstrated in 0.18-m CMOS. The use of substrate-shielded coplanar waveguide structures for matching networks results in low passive loss and small die size. Simple circuit techniques based on stability criteria derived result in an unconditionally stable amplifier. The power amplifier achieves a power gain of 7 dB and a maximum single-ended output power of +14.5-dBm with a 3-dB bandwidth of 3.1 GHz, while drawing 100 mA from a 2.8-V supply. The chip area is 1.26 mm 2 .

Extremely wideband signal shaping using one- and two-dimensional nonuniform nonlinear transmission lines

“…For example, these bottlenecks arise in high-frequency fully-integrated power amplifier design. 1,2 These same considerations hold for the wider class of active devices. Even if we restrict consideration to siliconbased technologies, active devices are technology dependent, making it difficult to port the design from one complementary metal-oxide semiconductor ͑CMOS͒ technology to another.…”

Fully integrated millimeter-wave CMOS phased arrays

“…The 4-element fully-integrated transmitter includes four on-chip power amplifiers [4] as well as an integrated frequency synthesizer. Due to concerns related to frequency pulling caused by electromagnetic and substrate coupling, direct up-conversion was considered to be unsuitable.…”

The future of high frequency circuit design

“…This is mainly due to the lower transistor breakdown voltages resulting from the scaling process and the shrinking of the depletion regions in the transistors, which necessitates the use of a lower power supply voltage. Unfortunately, this is in direct conflict with the maximum power that can be generated using conventional power amplifier techniques, which makes it almost inevitable to use parallel structures and novel power combing approaches, as described in [13] [14] and [28]- [31]. These approaches in turn are more susceptible .to different energy loss mechanism in passive devices that were dIScussed earlier.…”