Millimeter-Wave CMOS Power Amplifiers With High Output Power and Wideband Performances

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a design method of multi-way combining networks with impedance transformation for millimeter-wave (MMW) power amplifiers (PAs) to achieve high output power and wideband performance simultaneously in millimeter-wave frequency. Based on the proposed methodology, three power amplifiers are designed and fabricated in V-band, W-band, and D-band using 65-nm CMOS technology. With 1.2-V supply, the saturation powers of these power amplifiers are 23.2 dBm, 18 dBm and 13.2 dBm at 64 GHz, 90 GHz, and 140 GHz, with 25.1-GHz, 26-GHz, and 30-GHz 3-dB bandwidth, respectively. Compared with the published MMW amplifiers, these PAs achieve high output power and wide band performances simultaneously, and the ouput power levels is the state-of-the-art performance at these frequencies.Index Terms-CMOS, high output power, impedance transformation, millimeter-wave, power amplifier, power combining, wideband.

A 60 GHz 19.6 dBm Power Amplifier With 18.3% PAE in 40 nm CMOS

“…The measurement reveals a 3 dB bandwidth of 12 GHz for from 52 to 64 GHz. Table I summarizes the performance of the PA and compares it with published 40 and 65 nm CMOS 60 GHz PA [4]- [7].…”

A broadband GaAs high power millimeter wave amplifier with high gain and flatness

“…These studies used approaches such as CDA [2], SSDA [4], CSSDA [5][6][7], CDA-CSSDA [8], lossy CSSDA [9], CDA-Cascaded single-ended stages [10], and N-way combinations [11]. High degrees of gain, flatness and output power are achieved simultaneously in our design.…”

“…As a result, the output power is limited to 16 dBm. However, CDA-cascaded single-ended stages amplifier has the potential of further producing higher output power using the N-way combination method [11]. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first time that the two amplifiers based on a distributed stage and cascaded single-ended stages have been combined for high power.…”

140 GHz power amplifier based on 0.5 µm composite collector InP DHBT

“…Power amplifier (PA) is the key component in submillimeter wave system for the output power determined the operation distance, ability of anti-interference, and communication quality. Recently, massive D-band (110∼170 GHz) PA are presented [3,4,5,6,7,8] indicated a great attention has been paid in this field.…”