Tobias Tired, H. Sjöland, Göran Jönsson, J. Wernehag
{"title":"Comparison of two SiGe 2-stage E-band power amplifier architectures","authors":"Tobias Tired, H. Sjöland, Göran Jönsson, J. Wernehag","doi":"10.1109/APCCAS.2016.7804085","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"This paper presents simulation and measurement results for two 2-stage E-band power amplifiers implemented in 0.18 μm SiGe technology with fr = 200 GHz. To increase the power gain by mitigating the effect of the base-collector capacitance, the first design uses a differential cascode topology with a 2.7 V supply voltage. The second design instead uses capacitive cross-coupling of a differential common emitter stage, previously not demonstrated in mm-wave SiGe PAs, and has a supply voltage of only 1.5 V. Low supply voltage is advantageous since a common supply can then be shared between the transceiver and the PA. To maximize the power gain and robustness, both designs use a transformer based interstage matching. The cascode design achieves a measured power gain, S21, of 16 dB at 92 GHz with 17 GHz 3-dB bandwidth, and a simulated saturated output power, Psat, of 17 dBm with a 16% peak PAE. The cross-coupled design achieves a measured S21 of 10 dB at 93 GHz with 16 GHz 3-dB bandwidth, and a simulated Psat, of 15 dBm with 16% peak PAE. Comparing the measured and simulated results for the two amplifier architectures, the cascode topology is more robust, while the cross-coupled topology would benefit from a programmable cross-coupling capacitance.","PeriodicalId":6495,"journal":{"name":"2016 IEEE Asia Pacific Conference on Circuits and Systems (APCCAS)","volume":"99 1","pages":"666-669"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2016-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"3","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"2016 IEEE Asia Pacific Conference on Circuits and Systems (APCCAS)","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1109/APCCAS.2016.7804085","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"","JCRName":"","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 3
Abstract
This paper presents simulation and measurement results for two 2-stage E-band power amplifiers implemented in 0.18 μm SiGe technology with fr = 200 GHz. To increase the power gain by mitigating the effect of the base-collector capacitance, the first design uses a differential cascode topology with a 2.7 V supply voltage. The second design instead uses capacitive cross-coupling of a differential common emitter stage, previously not demonstrated in mm-wave SiGe PAs, and has a supply voltage of only 1.5 V. Low supply voltage is advantageous since a common supply can then be shared between the transceiver and the PA. To maximize the power gain and robustness, both designs use a transformer based interstage matching. The cascode design achieves a measured power gain, S21, of 16 dB at 92 GHz with 17 GHz 3-dB bandwidth, and a simulated saturated output power, Psat, of 17 dBm with a 16% peak PAE. The cross-coupled design achieves a measured S21 of 10 dB at 93 GHz with 16 GHz 3-dB bandwidth, and a simulated Psat, of 15 dBm with 16% peak PAE. Comparing the measured and simulated results for the two amplifier architectures, the cascode topology is more robust, while the cross-coupled topology would benefit from a programmable cross-coupling capacitance.