Abstract
In this article, we report on compact solid-state power amplifier (SSPA) millimeter-wave monolithic integrated circuits (MMICs) covering the 280–330-GHz frequency range. The technology used is a 35-nm gate-length InGaAs metamorphic high-electron-mobility transistor (mHEMT) technology. Two power amplifier MMICs are reported, based on a compact unit amplifier cell, which is parallelized two times using two different Wilkinson power combiners. The Wilkinson combiners are designed using elevated coplanar waveguide and air-bridge thin-film transmission lines in order to implement low-loss 70-Ω lines in the back-end-of-line of this InGaAs mHEMT technology. The five-stage SSPA MMICs achieve a measured small-signal gain around 20 dB over the 280–335-GHz frequency band. State-of-the-art output power performance is reported, achieving at least 13 dBm over the 286–310-GHz frequency band, with a peak output power of 13.7 dBm (23.4 mW) at 300 GHz. The PA MMICs are designed for a reduced chip width while maximizing the total gate width of 512 μm in the output stage, using a compact topology based on cascode and common-source devices, improving the output power per required chip width significantly.
Highlights
I N RECENT years, the interest in the submillimeter-wave frequency regime around 300 GHz for communication, radar, and imaging applications has been growing
Over the frequency band of 200–350 GHz, the highest output power levels have been reported by solid-state power amplifier (SSPA) millimeter-wave monolithic integrated circuits (MMICs) realized in InP heterojunction bipolar transistor (HBT) and InP HEMT technologies [5]–[10] biased at 1.8–2.2 V
We report on broadband SSPA MMICs with more than 13-dBm output power over the 284–310-GHz frequency band, using a 35-nm InAlAs/InGaAs metamorphic highelectron-mobility transistor (mHEMT) technology
Summary
I N RECENT years, the interest in the submillimeter-wave frequency regime around 300 GHz for communication, radar, and imaging applications has been growing. Over the frequency band of 200–350 GHz, the highest output power levels have been reported by solid-state power amplifier (SSPA) millimeter-wave monolithic integrated circuits (MMICs) realized in InP HBT and InP HEMT technologies [5]–[10] biased at 1.8–2.2 V. Broadband InGaAs mHEMT based SSPA MMICs, on the other hand, have reported up to 6.8–8.6-dBm of output power over the 280–320-GHz frequency band in [11]. We report on broadband SSPA MMICs with more than 13-dBm output power over the 284–310-GHz frequency band, using a 35-nm InAlAs/InGaAs mHEMT technology. State-of-the-art 300-GHz imaging [12] and communication [14], [15] systems implemented in this technology are currently operating with output power levels around 5 dBm, using the PA described in [32]. The transmission lines, which are realized with this three-layer metal stack and are used for the wiring in this work, are discussed
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