A 0.7W fully integrated 42GHz power amplifier with 10% PAE in 0.13µm SiGe BiCMOS

Abstract

In this paper, we report a fully integrated power amplifier (PA) architecture that combines the power of 16 on-chip PAs using a 16-way zero-degree combiner to achieve an output power of 0.7W with a power-added efficiency (PAE) of 10% at 42GHz and a -3dB bandwidth of 9GHz. This is 2.6 times more output power than a recently reported millimeter-Wave (mm-Wave) silicon-based PA [1]. The circuit is a fully integrated mm-Wave PA achieving a leading output power approaching 1 Watt in a silicon process.