posted on 2018-12-11, 09:23authored byZhang Ju Hou, Yang Yang, Leung Chiu, Xi Zhu, Eryk Dutkiewicz, J. C. Vardaxoglou, Quan Xue
Load-variation insensitivity, for impedance matching between power amplifiers (PAs) and transmitting antennas, contributes to challenging the design of millimeter-wave wireless systems. In this paper, a W-band two-way balanced PA based on a compact quadrature coupler with a broadside coupled stripline (BCSL) as the core is presented to enhance the load-variation insensitivity and stability. The proposed coupler is truly broadband with low amplitude and phase imbalance. The proposed W-band balanced PA achieves higher power-added efficiency (PAE) and unsaturated output power sat over wide frequency bandwidth. The W-band balanced PA is implemented in a 0.13-μm SiGe BiCMOS process and achieves a measured sat of 16.3 dBm and a peak PAE of 14.1% at 100 GHz (with 1.6-V power supply). The measured sat with 1-dB bandwidth is from 91 to 102 GHz. The measured results present the feasibility of the compact quadrature coupler. The total chip surface area (with pads) is 0.64 mm 2 , where the size of the proposed quadrature coupler area is only 0.04 mm2.
Funding
This work was supported by the Fundamental Research Program of Shenzhen City under Grant JCYJ20160608153614297, in part by the National Key Basic Research Program of China (973 program) under Grant 2014CB339900, and in part by the Australian Research Council under Grant DE160101032.
History
School
Mechanical, Electrical and Manufacturing Engineering
Published in
IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems I: Regular Papers
Volume
65
Issue
7
Pages
2139 - 2150
Citation
HOU, Z.J. ... et al, 2018. A W-band balanced power amplifier using broadside coupled strip-line coupler in SiGe BiCMOS 0.13- μm technology. IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems I: Regular Papers, 65 (7), pp.2139-2150.