A 65 nm CMOS Power Amplifier With Peak PAE above 18.9% From 57 to 66 GHz Using Synthesized Transformer-Based Matching Network

Abstract

Maintaining good power performance in a large bandwidth continues to challenge the design of millimeter-wave (mm-wave) power amplifiers (PAs), including mm-wave PAs with transformer-based matching networks (TMNs). With a TMN synthesizing method which is proposed based on the derived matching equations of TMN, this challenge is addressed in this paper for wideband mm-wave PAs by designing both inter-stage matching networks and output matching network with small mismatch in the entire operating bandwidth. A 60 GHz PA with synthesized TMNs is designed in a 65 nm bulk CMOS technology, achieving smaller degradation of power performance in the 9 GHz bandwidth compared to reported works in more advanced CMOS technologies. From 57 to 66 GHz, the PA is measured with saturated output power $({\rm P}_{\rm SAT})$ of 13.94 to 14.35 dBm, ${\rm P}_{1{\rm dB}}$ of 10.81 to 11.68 dBm, and peak power added efficiency (PAE) of 18.9% to 21.1%. The PA is capable of delivering 16QAM modulated signal with output power larger than 10.8 dBm and PAE higher than 10.1% in all the 4 channels of 802.11ad when EVM is 8.91%.