A Wideband Class-AB Power Amplifier With 29–57-GHz AM–PM Compensation in 0.9-V 28-nm Bulk CMOS

A wideband amplitude to phase (AM–PM) compensated class-AB power amplifier (PA) suitable for highly integrated fifth-generation phased arrays is designed in 0.9-V 28-nm CMOS without RF ultra-thick top metal. Design techniques to realize broadband impedance transformation, power division/combining, and phase distortion linearization are discussed. Further, second-order effects due to practical layout constrains imposed by deep-scaled technologies are addressed and simple design solutions are proposed. The designed PA shows a measured <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$S_{21} -3$ </tex-math></inline-formula> dB bandwidth (BW) from 29 to 57 GHz (65%) with <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$|\text {AM}-\text {PM}|<1 {^{\circ }}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> up to <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$P_{1~\text {dB}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>. The measured <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$P_{\mathrm{ sat}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> is 15.1 dBm over >56% <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\text {BW}_{-1~\text {dB}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>, with a peak power added efficiency of 24.2%. When a signal with wide modulation BW is applied, the realized PA enables up to 10.1-, 8.9-, and 5.9-dBm average <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$P_{\mathrm{ OUT}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> while amplifying a 1.5-, 3-, and 6-Gb/s 64-quadratic-amplitude modulation, respectively, at 34 GHz. The in-band and out-of-band linearity measured in error vector magnitude and adjacent channel power ratio are always better than −25 dB and −30 dBc, respectively, without any digital pre-distortion.

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