V-band high gain SiGe power amplifier with wideband ESD protection

Abstract

This paper presents a low-power high-gain V-band power amplifier (PA) in a low-cost commercial 0.18-μm SiGe BiCMOS technology. A novel wideband ESD protection circuit is demonstrated with <;1 dB insertion loss in frequency range of 17-88 GHz. Design techniques utilized to optimize the gain and the power consumption are addressed. In the 60GHz frequency range, the designed PA achieves a peak gain of 20.8 dB under 1.8 V supply and 25.3 dB under 2.4 V supply respectively. The input return loss is better than -10 dB from 50 GHz to 75 GHz. It delivers 8.4 dBm saturated output power at 67 GHz with a 2.4 V supply. TLP measurement result shows that the voltage is clamped below 6 V even under 10 A ESD current.