A Broadband Transformer-Based Power Amplifier Achieving 24.5-dBm Output Power Over 24–41 GHz in 65-nm CMOS Process

Abstract

A fully integrated one-stage cascode wideband power amplifier (PA) in 65-nm CMOS technology is presented in this letter. A matching technique is leveraged to achieve broadband matching network, which provides optimum load impedance for maximum output power within a wide operating frequency range. The proposed PA shows measured results of 24.5-dBm saturated output power (P <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">sat</sub> ) covering the full Ka-band (26.5-40 GHz) and 38.2% output 1-dB compression point (OP1dB) fractional bandwidth (BW) from 25 to 37 GHz. To the best of the authors' knowledge, the proposed PA demonstrates superior output power BW performance compared with the reported state-of-the-art Ka-band CMOS PAs.