A 140- and 220-GHz Dual-Band Amplifier in 130-nm SiGe BiCMOS Process

Abstract

This article presents a concurrent dual-band power amplifier (PA) in 130-nm SiGe BiCMOS process. A three-stage stacked BJT amplifier configuration is employed to enhance both the power gain and the output power. To achieve dual-band low-loss matching, the subquarter-wavelength-based baluns are adopted to construct the input and output matching networks. In addition, multiorder LC networks are introduced to achieve excellent dual-band interstage impedance matching. The proposed three-stage dual-band PA exhibits maximum small signal gains of 25.4 dB at 135 GHz and 21.6 dB at 210 GHz, with 3-dB bandwidths of 28 and 25 GHz, respectively. The measured results show a saturated power (Psat) of more than 13.1 dBm and 9.6 dBm and a power-added efficiency (PAE) of more than 6.75% and 3.1% over ranges of 126–154 GHz and 200–225 GHz, respectively. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the proposed PA achieves the higher Psat and PAE value than other dual-band PA operating at frequencies greater than 100 GHz with silicon-based process.