4.7 A Compact DC-to-108GHz Stacked-SOI Distributed PA/Driver Using Multi-Drive Inter-Stack Coupling, Achieving 1.525THz GBW, 20.8dBm Peak P<inf>1dB</inf>, and Over 100Gb/s in 64-QAM and PAM-4 Modulation

Abstract

Distributed amplifiers (DAs) are important circuit blocks for wireline optical links, high-resolution imaging systems, and millimeter-wave instrumentation. A clear trade-off exits in DAs between the gain and output power from one side and the bandwidth and chip area from the other. In this work, we propose a compact 23dB-gain CMOS distributed power amplifier (DPA) that operates from DC to 108GHz using several techniques to alleviate the output power-bandwidth tradeoff. The DPA exploits the complementary nature of NMOS-PMOS to minimize AM-AM and AM-PM distortion and achieves over 100Gb/s in both 64-QAM and PAM4 modulation.