A 41-GHz 19.4-dBm P_sat CMOS Doherty power amplifier for 5G NR applications

Abstract

In this letter, a 41-GHz Doherty power amplifier (PA) in standard 65nm CMOS technology is introduced for 5G New Radio (NR) applications. The proposed PA implements the transformer-based parallel-combined Doherty structure to enhance the power-added efficiency (PAE). A tunable 90-deg hybrid coupler is proposed for output phase compensation. This work achieves a saturated output power (P sat ) of 19.4dBm and an OP1dB of 18.6dBm at 41.5GHz under a 1-V power supply. The peak PAE and the PAE at 6-dB output power back-off (PBO) are 30.4% and 19.2%, respectively. This work also supports single-carrier mode (SC-mode) 400-MSymbols/s 256QAM and OFDMA-mode 400-MHz 256QAM. The core chip area is 0.22 mm 2 with a static power consumption of 76mW.