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Design of a W-band High-PAE Class A & AB Power Amplifier in 150 nm GaAs Technology

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Abstract

Nanometer scale power amplifiers (PA) at sub-THz suffer from severe parasitic effects that lead to experience limited maximum frequency and reduced power performance at the device transceiver front end. The integrated circuits researchers proposed different PA design architecture combinations at scaled down technologies to overcome these limitations. Although the designs meet the minimum requirements, the power added efficiency (PAE) of PA is still quite low. In this paper, a W-band single-ended common-source (CS) and cascode integrated 3-stage 2-way PA design is proposed. The design integrated different key design methodologies to mitigate the parasitic; such as combined Class AB and Class A stages for gain-boosting and efficiency enhancement, Wilkinson power combiner for higher output power, linearity, and bandwidth, and transmission line (TL)-based wide band matching network for better inter-stage matching and compact size. The proposed PA design is validated using UMS 150-nm GaAs pHEMT using advanced design system (ADS) simulator. The results show that the proposed PA achieved a gain of 20.1 dB, an output power of 17.2 dBm, a PAE of 33% and a 21 GHz bandwidth at 90 GHz Sub-THz band. The PA layout consumes only 5.66 × 2.51 mm2 die space including pads. Our proposed PA design will boost the research on sub-THz integrated circuits research and will smooth the wide spread adoption of 6G in near future.

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Abbreviations

BW3dB :

3-dB bandwidth

CE:

Common emitter

CG:

Common gate

CS:

Common source

CMOS:

Complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor

Cu:

Copper

DC-IV:

Direct-Current Current-Voltage

FET:

Field effect transistor

ft/fmax :

Transit frequency/maximum oscillation frequency

GaAs:

Gallium arsenide

IC:

Integrated circuit

ML:

Microstrip lines

mmW:

Millimeter-wave

PA:

Power amplifier

pHEMT:

Pseudomorphic high electron mobility transistor

Psat :

Saturated output power

PAE:

Power added efficiency

Q:

Matching locci

SOI:

Silicon on insulator

THz:

Terahertz

TL:

Transmission lines

2DEG:

Two-dimensional electron gas

3D:

Three Dimension

5G:

Fifth-generation

6G:

Sixth-generation

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank United Monolithic Semiconductors (UMS) for providing the PDK file to support the research. This research is financially supported by **amen University Malaysia (Project code: XMUMRF/2021-C8/IECE/0021). The authors would like to thank the reviewers’ constructive suggestions and comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Electronic, Information and Electrical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China

    Jun Yan Lee

  2. Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, **amen University Malaysia, Sepang, Malaysia

    Jun Yan Lee, Duo Wu, Xuanrui Guo, Mohammadmahdi Ariannejad & Mohammad Arif Sobhan Bhuiyan

  3. Department of Microelectronics, Delft University of Technology, Delft, Netherlands

    Xuanrui Guo

  4. School of Computing and Data Science, **amen University Malaysia, Sepang, Malaysia

    Mahdi H. Miraz

  5. Faculty of Arts, Science and Technology, Wrexham University, Wrexham, UK

    Mahdi H. Miraz

  6. Faculty of Computing, Engineering and Science, University of South Wales, Swansea, UK

    Mahdi H. Miraz

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Lee, J.Y., Wu, D., Guo, X. et al. Design of a W-band High-PAE Class A & AB Power Amplifier in 150 nm GaAs Technology. Trans. Electr. Electron. Mater. 25, 304–313 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42341-024-00513-8

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