著者

Chongyu YU Jun FENG

出版者

The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers

雑誌

IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Electronics (ISSN:09168516)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.E105-C, no.5, pp.184-193, 2022-05-01

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A linear and broadband power amplifier (PA) for 5G phased-array is presented. The design improves the linearity by operating the transistors in deep class AB region. The design broadens the bandwidth by applying the inter-stage weakly-coupled transformer. The theory of transformers is illustrated by analyzing the odd- and even-mode model. Based on this, the odd-mode Q factor is used to evaluate the quality of impedance matching. Weakly- and strongly-coupled transformers are compared and analyzed in both the design process and applicable characteristics. Besides, a well-founded method to achieve the transformer-based balanced-unbalanced transformation is proposed. The fully integrated two-stage PA is designed and implemented in a 65-nm CMOS process with a 1-V power supply to provide a maximum small-signal gain of 19dB. The maximum output 1-dB compressed power (P1dB) of 17.4dBm and the saturated output power (PSAT) of 18dBm are measured at 28GHz. The power-added efficiency (PAE) of the P1dB is 26.5%. From 23 to 32GHz, the measured P1dB is above 16dBm, covering the potential 5G bands worldwide around 28GHz.