A 1V SiGe power amplifier for 81–86 GHz E-band

Author

Tired, Tobias ; Sjoland, Henrik ; Bryant, Carl ; Tormanen, Markus

Author_Institution

Dept. of Electr. & Inf. Technol., Lund Univ., Lund, Sweden

fYear

2013

fDate

11-12 Nov. 2013

Firstpage

1

Lastpage

4

Abstract

This paper presents an architecture for a SiGe E-band power amplifier using a stacked transformers for output power combination. According to simulations, at E-band frequencies, the power combiner consisting of two individual single turn transformers performs significantly better compared to a single common 2:1 transformer with two turns on the secondary side. The power combination allows for a low supply voltage of 1 V, which is beneficial since the supply can be shared between the power amplifier and the transceiver thereby eliminating the need of a separate voltage regulator. To improve the gain of the two-stage amplifier it employs a capacitive cross-coupling technique not yet seen in mm-wave SiGe PAs. The PA is designed in a SiGe process with fr = 200 GHz and achieves a power gain of 12dB, a saturated output power of 16dBm and a 14% peak PAE.

Keywords

Ge-Si alloys; millimetre wave power amplifiers; power combiners; transceivers; transformers; SiGe; capacitive cross-coupling technique; efficiency 14 percent; frequency 200 GHz; frequency 81 GHz to 86 GHz; gain 12 dB; mm-wave PA; output power combination; single turn stacked transformer; transceiver; two-stage E-band power amplifier; voltage 1 V; voltage regulator; Capacitors; Circuit faults; Couplings; Layout; Power amplifiers; Power generation; Silicon germanium;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

NORCHIP, 2013

Conference_Location

Vilnius

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/NORCHIP.2013.6702018

Filename

6702018