Area Efficient and Linear MMIC Based Ka Band Power Amplifier for 5G Communication Systems

Abstract

This work presents a monolithic microwave integrated circuit (MMIC) based power amplifier (PA) with single 150 nm GaN high electron mobility transistor (HEMT) using broadband matching. For the proposed amplifier, two stage L-type biasing network is designed. In order to provide good linearity, low Q, broader bandwidth and optimized chip area, band pass filter (BPF) type matching network is proposed. The topology and parameter selection is done by performing proper load pull analysis. This helps in achieving wide band matching to maintain low Q factor. Thus the proposed amplifier is evaluated with post layout EM simulation data. For the 26 GHz band of 5G communication, proposed amplifier has a small signal gain of 11 dB for 21-27.4 GHz. The amplifier offers 33.42 dBm saturated output power and good linearity. The designed PA provides 31.35 dBm output power, 26% power added efficiency (PAE) and 29% drain efficiency (DE) at 1 dB compression with IP3 of 39.67 dBm for 26 GHz band. The designed PA has less complexity and small chip area of 4.3 mm2.