Ka-Band Dual Input Stacked 22 nm CMOS FDSOI Power Amplifier with Transformer-Based Power Combiner

A Ka-band dual input, three stack power amplifier (PA) is designed and fabricated using 22nm CMOS FDSOI. The PA output matching is implemented with a transformer-based combiner, which allows tuning the load with bias and input drive settings. The PA shows maximum output power, gain, one dB output power compression point (P1dB) and power added efficiency (PAE) of 19.5dBm, 11.5dB, 14.1dBm and 17%, respectively, measured at 29.5 GHz. Measured amplitude to phase modulation (AM-PM) stays at very low level, below 0.7° up to P1dB and below 2.6° up to P3dB. With a 100 MHz 64-QAM OFDM signal the PA achieves 8% error vector magnitude (EVM) and -28dBc adjacent channel leakage ratio (ACLR) at 6.3dBm and 7.6dBm output channel power, respectively.

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