On-Chip Temperature Compensation for Small-Signal Gain Variation Reduction

Abstract

Power amplifier (PA) specifications are closely related to changes in temperature; thus, the small-signal gain (S21) of PA decreases with the temperature increase. To compensate for the degradation caused by the decrease in S21, we present a compensation circuit that consists of two diodes and four resistors. At the same time, a differential stacked millimeter-wave wideband PA was designed and implemented based on this compensation circuit and 55 nm CMOS process. The post-layout simulation results showed that the fluctuation of S21 reduced from 2.4 dB to 0.1 dB in the frequency range of 25−40 GHz over the temperature range of −40 °C to 125 °C. Furthermore, the proposed on-chip temperature compensation circuit also applies to multi-stage cascaded microwave/mm-wave power amplifiers.