A Compact, Highly Linear Ku-Band SiGe HBT Power Amplifier Using Shared Single Center-Tap Four-Way Output Transformer Balun for Emerging Low Earth Orbit SATCOM Phased-Array Transmitter

• Published in: 2024 IEEE Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits Symposium (RFIC) pp. 295 - 298
• Main Authors: Yoon, Byeongcheol, Han, In Su, Kim, Junghyun, Ju, Inchan
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 16.06.2024
• Subjects: Area measurement; Baluns; Extraterrestrial measurements; Ku-band; low earth orbit (LEO); Low earth orbit satellites; power amplifier (PA); Power amplifiers; Routing; satellite communications (SATCOM); Semiconductor device measurement; transformer (TF)
• DOI: 10.1109/RFIC61187.2024.10600029

This paper presents a compact, highly linear Ku-band SiGe HBT PA for Low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite communication (SATCOM). A four-way output transformer (TF) balun with a shared single center-tap (SSCT) is proposed not only for simplifying signal routing for compact chip size, but also obtaining high power combining efficiency. A prototype Ku-band SiGe PA, which merely occupies a core area of 0.21 mm 2 , attains measured peak output power (POUT) and power added efficiency (PAE) of 24.4 dBm and 32.1% at 11.7 GHz, respectively, with the highest power density of 1311.5 mW/mm 2 . The PA also delivers average POUT (Pavg) of 18.6/16.6 dBm with average PAE (PAEavg) of 16.0/12.6% at 250 MHz symbol rate DVB-S2X 64/256 APSK modulation.