A 26–40 GHz Wideband Power Amplifier with Transformer-Based High-Order Matching Networks in 28-nm CMOS FD-SOI

Abstract

This letter presents a wideband two-stage full Ka-band power amplifier (PA) with transformer-based matching networks (TMNs) in 28-nm CMOS fully depleted silicon on insulator (FD-SOI) technology. By considering the loss of the transformer, which has usually been ignored in previous works, methods to compensate for the nonflat gain in TMNs are studied and based on that, the initial guess for wideband TMNs design is extracted. Wideband performance in terms of gain and output power is delivered by designing wideband TMNs in the PA design and frequency-independent optimum load selection for the power cell. Measurement results show that the PA achieves 19 dB maximum gain with 13.8 GHz (42%) 3-dB bandwidth (BW), 16.1 dBm P $_{{out-1dB}}$ with 13 GHz 1-dB BW, 17.1 dBm P $_{{sat}}$ with 12 GHz 1-dB BW, and 25.3% peak power-added efficiency.