Design of high performance CMOS power amplifiers for 60 GHz applications

Abstract

Nowadays, wireless system data rates are limited to a few hundreds of Mbits/s due to the available spectrum limiting their bandwidth. However, due to a growing demand for very high data rate transmissions, as for example for HD video transfer or HDMI cable replacement, several standards have been proposed in the 60 GHz IMS band. With 9 GHz of available bandwidth, this frequency band is appropriate for short range multi-Gbit/s transmission. III–V technologies, such as GaAs or InP, are commonly used at such high frequencies as they provide higher performances than CMOS technologies. SiGe silicon technologies are also a good alternative to III–V technologies. However, all those technologies are too expensive with a manufacturing capacity and integration density much lower than CMOS technologies. There are therefore not competitive compared to CMOS for 60 GHz mass markets. To address 60 GHz emerging applications, most of millimeter wave transceiver parts have been recently integrated with success on the same substrate using CMOS process. Nevertheless, the integration of the power amplifier remains challenging as CMOS transistors have low gain and breakdown voltages. Furthermore a high quiescent power is inevitable to achieve high linearity required by the complex modulation scheme used to achieve high data rates.