A K-Band High-OP 1dB Common-Drain Power Amplifier With Neutralization Technique in 90-nm CMOS Technology

Abstract

This letter presents a fully integrated ${K}$ -band high output 1-dB compression point ( $OP_{1\text {dB}}$ ) power amplifier (PA) fabricated in the 90-nm CMOS process. Common-drain (CD) structure is adopted to achieve high $OP_{1\text {dB}}$ . Since the CD structure suffers from the poor stability and power gain, the proposed neutralization technique for the CD amplifier is used to improve both of them simultaneously. The measured results of the proposed PA demonstrate the saturated output power ( $P_{\text {sat}}$ ) of 22.9 dBm with 24.2% peak power-added efficiency (PAE), $OP_{1\text {dB}}$ of 22.5 dBm with 22.5% PAE. To the best of authors’ knowledge, the proposed CD PA is the first CMOS CD PA above 10 GHz.