Design Of High-performance Silicon-based Millimeter-wave Power Amplifier

With the rapid development of wireless communication technology,low-frequency spectrum resources have been exhausted by applications such as WIFI and Bluetooth.Researchers are paying more and more attention to the development and application of millimeter wave bands,including fifth-generation mobile communications,automotive radars,weather radars,and clinical applications.Medicine,spectroscopy,etc.The circuit in the millimeter wave frequency band has a very high operating frequency,so the requirements for the device process are very strict.Processes such as Si Ge,HBT,CMOS,Ga As,Ga N,and In P are catching up with each other in the applications of many millimeter wave circuits.Silicon-based processes,such as CMOS,have always maintained a place in this competition due to their low cost and ultra-high integration.However,silicon-based technology also has disadvantages such as low breakdown voltage and high substrate loss.Therefore,how to use silicon-based technology to design high-performance millimeter-wave circuits has always been a hot spot for domestic and foreign scholars.This article mainly conducts in-depth research on silicon-based millimeter-wave power amplifiers.The main research work of this paper is as follows:Research on transformer-based power combining amplifiers.The mechanism that affects the gain and stability of the common-source amplifier is analyzed,and the corresponding solutions are analyzed.The advantages and disadvantages of several commonly used power combining methods are analyzed,and two power amplifiers are designed using direct parallel power combining technology.The first power amplifier works in the W band and is implemented using a 65-nm CMOS process.The simulation shows that its peak gain is 15.7dB,the maximum saturated output power reaches 14.6d Bm,and the 3dB bandwidth is 20 GHz.The second power amplifier is implemented using the same process,working at 26 GHz,and achieving a small signal gain of 25.8dB,with saturated output power and peak power additional efficiency of 18dBm and 22%,respectively.Research on non-uniform distributed power amplifier.The technical characteristics of existing distributed amplifiers are analyzed,and a design method for non-uniform distributed power amplifiers suitable for CMOS technology is proposed.Compared with conventional uniform distributed power amplifiers,this structure can achieve higher output power and efficiency.Finally,a power amplifier with a 3dB bandwidth of 1.7 to12.6 GHz and a maximum saturated output power and power added efficiency of 21dBm and 27.7% were designed using a 180 nm CMOS process.Research on ultra-wideband highly linear power amplifiers.This paper studies the method of implementing a broadband matching network based on transformers.On this basis,a circuit structure for improving the linearity and output return loss of cascode amplifiers is proposed.A broadband,highly linear power amplifier with operating frequency covering the entire Ka band is designed.Simulation results show that its 3d B bandwidth covers 21.5?40 GHz,its peak gain is 20dB,its maximum saturated output power is 19.2dBm,its maximum OP1dB is 16.1dBm,and its maximum power added efficiency is 25.2%.Compared with Class A amplifiers,the IMD3 is improved by up to30dBc in the power range from-5dBm to 5dBm.