A 65 nm CMOS Power Amplifier With Peak PAE above 18.9% From 57 to 66 GHz Using Synthesized Transformer-Based Matching Network

Maintaining good power performance in a large bandwidth continues to challenge the design of millimeter-wave (mm-wave) power amplifiers (PAs), including mm-wave PAs with transformer-based matching networks (TMNs). With a TMN synthesizing method which is proposed based on the derived matching equations of TMN, this challenge is addressed in this paper for wideband mm-wave PAs by designing both inter-stage matching networks and output matching network with small mismatch in the entire operating bandwidth. A 60 GHz PA with synthesized TMNs is designed in a 65 nm bulk CMOS technology, achieving smaller degradation of power performance in the 9 GHz bandwidth compared to reported works in more advanced CMOS technologies. From 57 to 66 GHz, the PA is measured with saturated output power (PSAT) of 13.94 to 14.35 dBm, P1dBof 10.81 to 11.68 dBm, and peak power added efficiency (PAE) of 18.9% to 21.1%. The PA is capable of delivering 16QAM modulated signal with output power larger than 10.8 dBm and PAE higher than 10.1% in all the 4 channels of 802.11ad when EVM is 8.91%.