A K-Band Broadband Power Amplifier With 15.7 dBm Power and 30.4% PAE in 0.13 <i>μ</i>m CMOS
Jinwei Li, Bing Sun, Jiawei Huang, Lei Wu, Hudong Chang, Rui Jia, Honggang Liu
Abstract
This brief presents a K-band broadband power amplifier (PA) fabricated with 0.13- <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mu \text{m}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> CMOS technology for fifth-generation (5G) and radar applications. Asymmetrical magnetically coupled resonators (MCRs) are used input, inter-stage and output matching networks to extend the operating bandwidth. Analytic expressions for the asymmetrical MCRs matching network are presented for design guidelines. Two new mismatch parameters <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\alpha $ </tex-math></inline-formula> and <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\beta $ </tex-math></inline-formula> are proposed to provide an additional design degree of leveling off gain ripples due to the transformer loss. The measurement results demonstrate 30.4% peak power added efficiency (PAEmax), 15.7 dBm saturated output power (Psat), and 12.1 dBm compression point (P1dB). The PA shows a flat small gain performance across 22.7 to 27 GHz with 0.3 dB ripple and 1.5 dB <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$P_{\mathrm{ sat}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> ripple. Compared with other works, this PA demonstrates wide bandwidth, high efficiency, and superior gain flatness.