A 77 GHz Power Amplifier with 19.1 dBm Peak Output Power in 130 nm SiGe Process

Peigen Zhou; Pinpin Yan; Jixin Chen; Zhe Chen; Wei Hong

doi:10.3390/mi14122238

A 77 GHz Power Amplifier with 19.1 dBm Peak Output Power in 130 nm SiGe Process

Micromachines (Basel). 2023 Dec 14;14(12):2238. doi: 10.3390/mi14122238.

Authors

Peigen Zhou¹, Pinpin Yan¹, Jixin Chen¹, Zhe Chen¹, Wei Hong¹

Affiliation

¹ State Key Laboratory of Millimeter Waves, School of Information Science and Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing 210096, China.

Abstract

This article reports a two-stage differential structure power amplifier based on a 130 nm SiGe process operating at 77 GHz. By introducing a tunable capacitor for amplitude and phase balance at the center tap of the secondary coil of the traditional Marchand balun, the balun achieves amplitude imbalance less than 0.5 dB and phase imbalance less than 1 degree within the operating frequency range of 70-85 GHz, which enables the power amplifier to exhibit comparable output power over a wide operating frequency band. The power amplifier, based on a designed 3-bit digital analog convertor (DAC)-controlled base bias current source, exhibits small signal gain fluctuation of less than 5 dB and saturation output power fluctuation of less than 2 dB near the 80 GHz frequency point when the ambient temperature varies in the range of -40 °C to 125 °C. Benefiting from the aforementioned design, the tested single-path differential power amplifier exhibits a small signal gain exceeding 16 dB, a saturation output power exceeding 18 dBm, and a peak saturation output power of 19.1 dBm in the frequency band of 70-85 GHz.

Keywords: DAC; SiGe; W-band; power amplifier.

Grants and funding

This work was supported in part by the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province under Grant BK20210206, in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 62101117, in part by the Project funded by China Postdoctoral Science Foundation under Grants 2021M700763 and 2022T150113, and in part by the State Key Laboratory of Mobile Network and Mobile Multimedia Technique, ZTE Corporation.