Silicon Based Terahertz Power Amplifier Design

Terahertz wave is between infrared band and microwave band,which is in the transition stage from macroelectronics to micro photonics.It is the last wireless band in the electromagnetic band that has not been fully recognized and used by human beings.Terahertz wave has the characteristics of high frequency,short pulse,strong penetration,small energy and large channel capacity,so it is widely used in terahertz imaging,detection,security inspection,communication and so on.As an important part of wireless transmitter,it is necessary to study the power amplifier in terahertz band.In the early design of RF power amplifier,the process of?-?compound semiconductor IC represented by Ga As and In P is in the dominant position,but the circuit designed by this process is difficult to integrate with other modules designed by CMOS process.In recent years,with the continuous improvement of SiGe BiCMOS process,the cut-off frequency and power density of the heterojunction bipolar transistor(HBT)have been significantly improved,and the process is compatible with the standard CMOS process.Therefore,using SiGe BiCMOS process to design power amplifier has become a hot spot and widely concerned by the industry.In this dissertation,the terahertz power amplifier isresearched and designed in 0.13?m SiGe BiCMOS process.The power amplifier is cascaded with three Cascode amplifiers,so higher output power and better linearity are obtained by two-way power combination.Cascode structure has significant advantages in the design of terahertz power amplifier,such as high gain,high output voltage swing and so on.Conjugate matching is used in input matching and inter stage matching,and load line matching is used in output.The power combiner is designed with T-shaped transmission line with smaller size and insertion loss.The schematic design,pre-simulation results,layout design,on-chip passive component design,joint simulation results and test scheme of 180 GHz power amplifier are presented in this paper.Under 3V supply voltage,the joint simulation results of terahertz power amplifier show that the output 1 d B compression point is 4.4 d Bm and the maximum power added efficiency(PAE)is 1.33%.The chip area is 662×770?m~2.