An X -Band Half-Watt CMOS Power Amplifier Using Interweaved Parallel Combining Transformer

• Published in: IEEE microwave and wireless components letters Vol. 27; no. 5; pp. 491 - 493
• Main Authors: Tsai, Jeng-Han, Wang, Jen-Wei
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.05.2017
• Subjects: Circuit faults; CMOS; CMOS technology; Insertion loss; power amplifiers (PAs); Power generation; Power transistors; Radio frequency; radio frequency integrated circuits; Semiconductor device measurement; X-band
• ISSN: 1531-1309; 1558-1764
• DOI: 10.1109/LMWC.2017.2690878

An X-band half-watt fully integrated power amplifier (PA) using standard 0.18-μm 1P6M CMOS technology is presented in this letter. Utilizing an interweaved three-primary parallel combining transformer, the CMOS PA delivers 27.1 dBm of measured saturation output power (Psat) with 22.7% of power-added efficiency at 9 GHz from a 3.3-V power supply. The measured output 1-dB gain compression point (OP1 dB) is 24.2 dBm and the gain performance is 11.2 dB at 9 GHz. The chip size is 1.045 × 0.84 mm 2 . To the best of our knowledge, the PA is the first half-watt CMOS PA with excellent power density at the X-band.