A Ku-Band High-Integrated CMOS Power Amplifier

Abstract

In order to improve output power of Si-based transmitter, a Ku-band highly-integrated power amplifier is designed, fabricated and measured. The proposed amplifier adopts a two-stage common-source differential topology, and capacitor-neutralized technology is used both stages in order to enhance the stability and gain performance of amplifier by neutralizing the gate-drain parasitic capacitance. For improving the output power, the second-stage employ a two-way power-combining structure, and the transformer-based power combiner is designed according to the optimum impedance of power matching. The measured results indicate that the power amplifier achieve 26.8 dB gain, 17.4 dBm 1-dB-compressed output power, 22.6 dBm saturated output power and 30% peak power added efficiency at 15.5 GHz with 570 mW DC power consumption.