A 60‐GHz power amplifier design with on‐chip tunable load‐matching network and power detect in 90‐nm CMOS

Abstract

This paper presents a 60-GHz power amplifier with on-chip varactor-based tunable load-matching networks and an embedded DC temperature-sensor-based power detector. The output power can be monitored by the DC temperature sensor, and loadmatching network can be tuned by regulating the control voltage of the varactors, which can be used for correcting unpredictable process, supply voltage, and temperature (PVT) variations and load mismatch. Measured results show that the small-signal gain of the CMOS power amplifier is up to 6.5 dB at 52 GHz. The power amplifier achieves 5 dBm output P1dB and 7 dBm saturated output power with 4.5% maximun power added efficiency (PAE) at 1 V control voltage. By sweeping the control voltage of the varactors, the power amplifier can obtain the maximun power gain, which can be used to solve the load mismatch.

Aging Compensation in a Class-A High-Frequency Amplifier with DC Temperature Measurements

“…Such temperature measurements can be done using Infra-Red (IR) imaging techniques [ 23 ], but it is most convenient to embed a differential sensor circuit integrated in the same chip and close to the PA being monitored. This has been proposed in [ 22 , 24 ] to monitor and optimize the efficiency in PA circuits, in [ 25 ] to monitor output mismatches and in [ 26 ] to monitor the output power and gain of class-A linear amplifiers. In all these cases, the PA performance variation was forced either by tuning its DC biasing or with a tunable load: never after real aging degradation of MOS transistors.…”

Single-MOSFET DC thermal sensor for RF-amplifier central frequency extraction

“…In that sense, on-line self-healing techniques based on thermal sensors have been proposed. For example, in [13], the output signal of the thermal sensor was employed to adjust a tunable load-matching network.…”