A 1V 19.3dBm 79GHz power amplifier in 65nm CMOS

Abstract

For a highly integrated wireless system including on-chip antennas, high-output- power power amplifiers (PA) are required to cover the desired transmission range. In order to achieve the output power level, power-combining techniques have gained more attention in recent years [1-5]. An efficient power-combining solution is essential since less DC power is needed for the same level of output power, and the difficulties of thermo-dissipation are thus relieved in a high-out- put-power PA. Transformer-based power combining is one of the common tech- niques, which can increase impedance-transformation ratio by increasing the number of input ports and results in a compact layout and reasonable loss [1-3, 5].