W-Band CMOS Amplifiers Achieving $+$10 dBm Saturated Output Power and 7.5 dB NF

Abstract

We present two W-band amplifiers, one implemented using conventional coplanar waveguides and unshielded passives and the other using slow-wave shielded waveguides and passives, realized in a 65-nm baseline CMOS technology. The measured results suggest that the slow-wave shielding of the passives is useful in achieving high performance and high frequency of operation. Our custom layout slotted plate capacitor employing slow-wave shield has low parasitic series resistance. Furthermore, as the substrate losses are minimal the modeling becomes more accurate. The measured based amplifier achieves +10 dBm output power at 100 GHz with a 1.2 V supply and 70 mA total DC-current consumption. The noise figure and gain at 100 GHz are 7.5 dB and 13 dB, respectively. The chip size of the implemented slow-wave amplifier is 0.33 mm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> .