A Q-band SiGe power amplifier with 17.5 dBm saturated output power and 26% peak PAE

Tai, Wei; Carley, L.R.; Ricketts, David S.

doi:10.1109/bctm.2011.6082768

Cited by 8 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…The PA is also configured so that the two columns of unit PAs can receive different input signal phases, allowing the outphasing technique to be employed for output power back-off. The unit PA design is similar to that reported in [7]. As shown schematically in Fig.…”

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confidence: 65%

“…The output stage of the PA operates at a 2.4V supply, whereas the two cascode driver stages use a 4V supply. The transistors operate safely under these supply voltages due to a low base bias impedance of approximately 300Ω [5,7]. A total of 91pF of decoupling capacitance per unit PA is spread across the supply feed lines to minimize trace inductance and further improve PA stability.…”

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A 0.7W fully integrated 42GHz power amplifier with 10% PAE in 0.13µm SiGe BiCMOS

Tai

Carley

Ricketts

2013

2013 IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference Digest of Technical Papers

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In this paper, we report a fully integrated power amplifier (PA) architecture that combines the power of 16 on-chip PAs using a 16-way zero-degree combiner to achieve an output power of 0.7W with a power-added efficiency (PAE) of 10% at 42GHz and a -3dB bandwidth of 9GHz. This is 2.6 times more output power than a recently reported millimeter-Wave (mm-Wave) silicon-based PA [1]. The circuit is a fully integrated mm-Wave PA achieving a leading output power approaching 1 Watt in a silicon process.To date only a few published mm-Wave PAs in silicon have achieved a saturated output power of more than 20dBm (100mW) [2][3][4][5][6]. The difficulty in achieving high output powers at mm-Wave frequencies lies in the limited output power of a single PA, which is constrained by maximum current density, breakdown voltage and parasitics of the technology. Moreover, to obtain maximum power from a single PA, its output impedance must be lowered due to the relative low breakdown voltage of silicon devices. In fully integrated designs, this low impedance must then be impedance transformed to the desired output impedance through a lossy on-chip impedance transformer, reducing the overall net output power.Power combining multiple PAs is a common approach to obtaining larger output powers. As more unit PAs are combined, the required impedance transformation ratio as well as voltage and thermal stress on each unit PA is relaxed. However, the insertion loss of traditional power combiners, e.g. Wilkinson combiners [3] and transformer-based combiners [4,5], tends to scale up as the number of combined PAs increases due to increased size and complexity of the combiners. Part of the additional size and complexity stems from maintaining portto-port isolation in the combiner, particularly with Wilkinson combiners. If we assume, however, that all combiner inputs have zero-degree phase difference (i.e. in-phase), port isolation is no longer a major constraint. In this case, the requirement for exact quarter-wavelength segments in the Wilkinson combiner is removed and arbitrary line lengths can be used subject only to layout constraints and impedance transformation requirements. It is then possible to significantly reduce the combiner size and insertion loss while simultaneously achieving the desired impedance transformation. In this work, we combine the power of 16 PAs using a 16-way zero-degree combiner that achieves low insertion loss and wideband impedance transformation.The combiner is developed using scalable SPICE transmission line models derived from EM field simulations. The simulated insertion loss of the combiner is less than 0.5dB at 45GHz. It also performs the required impedance transformation and presents the optimum load impedance to each unit PA, whose value was obtained from load-pull simulations of the unit PA output stage. Since a dedicated impedance transformation network is no longer needed, the associated power loss is avoided. We improve the isolation between input ports to better than 10dB by inserting a small resistor b...

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A 0.7W fully integrated 42GHz power amplifier with 10% PAE in 0.13µm SiGe BiCMOS

Tai

Carley

Ricketts

2013

2013 IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference Digest of Technical Papers

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A Q-Band/W-Band Dual-Band Power Amplifier in 0.12 µm SiGe BiCMOS Process

Buckwalter

2013

2013 IEEE Compound Semiconductor Integrated Circuit Symposium (CSICS)

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A 21.08 dBm Q-band power amplifier in 90-nm CMOS process

Huang

Guo

et al. 2014

2014 IEEE International Wireless Symposium (IWS 2014)

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This paper presents a Q-band four stage power amplifier (PA) fabricated by 90nm CMOS process. In order to improve the output power of the PA, an eight-way distributed active transformer was used for power combining. The simulated insertion loss of the transformer power combiner is less than 1dB at 45 GHz. This paper also shows a way to design transformer baluns for impedance matching. The measurement results of the PA show that the power amplifier achieved 21.08 dBm saturation output power, 20.38 dB small-signal gain and 14.5% power-added-efficiency (PAE) at 45 GHz with 1.2V supply. The entire PA core occupies 0.83mm 2 die area. And the 3dB bandwidth of the PA is extended from 43 GHz to 47 GHz.Index Terms -Power amplifier (PA), transformer power combiner, transformer balun, Q-band, CMOS.

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A Q-band SiGe power amplifier with 17.5 dBm saturated output power and 26% peak PAE

Cited by 8 publications

References 10 publications

A 0.7W fully integrated 42GHz power amplifier with 10% PAE in 0.13µm SiGe BiCMOS

A 0.7W fully integrated 42GHz power amplifier with 10% PAE in 0.13µm SiGe BiCMOS

A Q-Band/W-Band Dual-Band Power Amplifier in 0.12 µm SiGe BiCMOS Process

A 21.08 dBm Q-band power amplifier in 90-nm CMOS process

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A Q-band SiGe power amplifier with 17.5 dBm saturated output power and 26% peak PAE

Cited by 8 publications

References 10 publications

A 0.7W fully integrated 42GHz power amplifier with 10% PAE in 0.13&#x00B5;m SiGe BiCMOS

A 0.7W fully integrated 42GHz power amplifier with 10% PAE in 0.13&#x00B5;m SiGe BiCMOS

A Q-Band/W-Band Dual-Band Power Amplifier in 0.12 µm SiGe BiCMOS Process

A 21.08 dBm Q-band power amplifier in 90-nm CMOS process

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A 0.7W fully integrated 42GHz power amplifier with 10% PAE in 0.13µm SiGe BiCMOS

A 0.7W fully integrated 42GHz power amplifier with 10% PAE in 0.13µm SiGe BiCMOS