204GHz Stacked-Power Amplifiers Designed by a Novel Two-Port Technique

We report stacked mm-wave power amplifiers designed by a novel 2-port technique. Two power amplifiers designed into 130-nm InP HBT to verify the technique. The first design (unit cell) biased at 436mW Pdc produces 34.6mW saturated output power with 5.8% PAE at 204GHz. The amplifier has a 13.9dB peak small signal gain at 236GHz and 27 GHz 3–dB bandwidth. The chip size is 0.63mm×0.54mm including the pads. The second design combines two cells in parallel with an additional gain stage. The design consumes 1.18W Pdc and it shows a 63mW saturated output power with 4.8%PAE at 204GHz. The amplifier has a 22.7 dB peak small signal gain at 230GHz and larger than 25GHz 3–dB bandwidth. The chip size is 0.7mm×1.3mm including the pads. The paper reports the first stacked power amplifier designed in a rigorous way at mm-wave frequenices.