Design of a V-Band 20-dBm Wideband Power Amplifier Using Transformer-Based Radial Power Combining in 90-nm CMOS

This paper presents a V-band 1.2-V wideband power amplifier (PA) with a compact four-way radial power combiner in a 90-nm CMOS process. A transformer-based radial power combiner with a 1-dB insertion loss at 60 GHz and a 0.043-mm(2) compact size is designed for high-output-power combining and wideband load-pull matching. This PA achieves the saturated output power (P-SAT) of 20.6 dBm, the maximum power-added efficiency (PAE(max)) of 20.3%, and a 20.1-dB small-signal gain (S-21) at 60 GHz. The PA maintains a flat 20-dBm P-SAT with PAE(max) better than 17.3% within 50-64 GHz, and it has a 3-dB bandwidth (BW) of 24.5 GHz (41.8-66.3 GHz). The chip area without pads is 0.432 mm(2). To the best of the author's knowledge, this V-band PA with a flat frequency response of 20-dBm P-SAT presents the widest large-signal BW (50-64 GHz) compared with the reported 60-GHz CMOS high-output PAs.