A W-band stacked FET power amplifier with 17 dBm Psat in 45-nm SOI CMOS

Author

Jayamon, J. ; Agah, A. ; Hanafi, B. ; Dabag, H. ; Buckwalter, J. ; Asbeck, P.

Author_Institution

Dept. of Electr. & Comput. Eng., Univ. of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA

fYear

2013

fDate

21-23 Jan. 2013

Firstpage

156

Lastpage

158

Abstract

A 90GHz power amplifier implemented with three series-connected (stacked) FETs in 45-nm SOI CMOS is reported. Stacking FETs allows increasing voltage handling capability of circuits with highly scaled CMOS transistors. This work shows for the first time that the stacking strategy is effective up to W band. The amplifier achieves power gain of 8 dB at 91 GHz with 3 dB bandwidth of 18 GHz using a supply voltage of 4.2 V. It delivers saturated output power of 17.3 dBm in 88-90 GHz range with peak PAE of 9 %. The PA chip occupies 0.256 mm² including the pads. This chip demonstrates the highest output power from a CMOS PA in this frequency regime.

Keywords

CMOS integrated circuits; field effect MIMIC; millimetre wave field effect transistors; millimetre wave power amplifiers; CMOS power amplifier; SOI CMOS; Si; W-band stacked FET power amplifier; bandwidth 18 GHz; frequency 88 GHz to 90 GHz; frequency 91 GHz; highly scaled CMOS transistors; size 45 nm; stacking FET; three series-connected FET; voltage 4.2 V; CMOS integrated circuits; Field effect transistors; Gain; Logic gates; Power amplifiers; Power generation; Stacking; CMOS SOI millimeter-wave; Power amplifier; W-band; stacked FET;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Silicon Monolithic Integrated Circuits in RF Systems (SiRF), 2013 IEEE 13th Topical Meeting on

Conference_Location

Austin, TX

Print_ISBN

978-1-4673-1552-4

Electronic_ISBN

978-1-4673-1551-7

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/SiRF.2013.6489464

Filename

6489464