Ka-band stacked and pseudo-differential orthogonal load-modulated balanced power amplifier in 22 nm CMOS FDSOI

Abstract This paper presents an integrated power amplifier (PA) following the orthogonal load-modulated balanced amplifier (OLMBA) topology. The fixed-phase prototype in this paper is implemented with 22 nm complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) fully depleted silicon-on-insulator (FDSOI) process. The proposed PA operates at 26 GHz frequency range, where it achieves 19.5 dBm output power, 16.6 dB gain, 15.7% power added efficiency, and 18.3 dBm output 1-dB compression point ( $P_{\rm 1\,dB}$ ). The PA is also tested with high dynamic range modulated signals, and it achieves, respectively, 11.4 dBm and 4.9 dBm average output power ( P avg ) with 100 MHz and 400 MHz 64-QAM third-generation partnership project/new radio frequency range 2 signals, and 14 dBm P avg with 0.6 Gb/s (120 MHz) single carrier 64-QAM signal, measured at 26 GHz and using −28 dBc adjacent channel leakage ratio and −21.9 dB (8%) error vector magnitude as threshold values. The proposed OLMBA is also compared to a stand-alone quadrature-balanced PA. Modulated measurements show that the stand-alone quadrature-balanced PA has better linearity in deep back-off, but the OLMBA has better efficiency.