A 2-22 GHz CMOS wideband distributed power amplifier

This article presents a novel wideband distributed power amplifier (DPA) implemented in a 0.18 m CMOS technology. The DPA consists of a preamplifier and a medium-power power amplifier (PA), and both of them are respectively composed of two distributed amplifiers (DAs), which have separate input artificial transmission lines (ATLs) but with their output ATLs shared to achieve wide frequency band. In the medium-power PA, the large-signal multigated transistor technology is applied to further improve the linear output power. Measurement results show that the DPA achieves 10.2 dB average associated gain from 2.5 to 22 GHz. The output power at 1-dB output compression point (OP1dB) is more than 8 dBm over the frequency of 2-22 GHz, and the peak OP1dB is 12.6 dBm with the power-added efficiency of 7.2% at 6 GHz.