220–320-GHz J-Band 4-Way Power Amplifier in Advanced 130-nm BiCMOS Technology

Abstract

A power combined wideband power amplifier (PA) covering the <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$J$ </tex-math></inline-formula> -band (220–320 GHz) is presented in 130-nm BiCMOS technology. The input power is split by two cascaded 1-to-2 power splitters with amplification stages in-between. The four split signals drive four output stages, which have their outputs combined within a 4-way zero-degree combiner. The splitting and combining networks also incorporate impedance matching. After de-embedding the I/O pads and baluns of 2 dB loss at each side, the PA achieves a gain of 20 dB at the middle of the band and a minimum gain of 17 dB at 320 GHz with I/O return losses below −5 dB. The PA records a saturated output power ranging from 9.5 to 14.5 dBm across the <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$J$ </tex-math></inline-formula> -band. It consumes 710 mW from a 3 V supply which corresponds to a drain efficiency ( <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\eta _{d}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> ) of 3.15% at 270 GHz. The presented PA achieves twice better bandwidth with 1.5 times better <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\eta _{d}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> than the state-of-the-art silicon-based amplifiers above 200 GHz. To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first PA covering the whole <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$J$ </tex-math></inline-formula> -band in silicon technologies.

Topics & Concepts