A 2-stage D-band Power Amplifier with 7 dBm Output Power at 0.14 THz in a 0.13μm SiGe Technology

Abstract

In this work, a D-band power amplifier with 7 dBm output at 0.14 THz is presented in a 0.13 μm SiGe:C BiCMOS technology. The $f_{t}$ and $f_{max}$ of this technology are 250GHz and 400GHz respectively. Due to the technology limitation, this work is close to the half of the $f_{max}$ whose performance is mainly limited by the parasitic. In this work, a two-stage differential cascode topology with transformer and inter-stage coupling is implemented with the $C_{CE}$ reduction layout optimization method to increase the output power. This D-band PA achieves a $P_{1dB}$ and $P_{sat}$ of 0.5 dBm and 7.1 dBm, respectively.