A Mm-Wave 5G Broadband Power Amplifier with Subthreshold Adaptive Biasing Network in 22 nm FD-SOI CMOS

An adaptive biasing network is implemented on a broadband millimeter-wave (mm-Wave) 5G power amplifier (PA) designed in a 22 nm FD-SOI (fully depleted silicon-oninsulator) CMOS process. The adaptive biasing network is used to improve the power-added efficiency (PAE) at power back-off, and the output-referred 1 dB compression point ($O P_{1 d B}$). In measurement, the one stage differential PA achieves a $S_{21} 3 \mathrm{~dB}$ BW of 21.2 – 46 GHz, a saturation output power (Pout,SAT) of $16.6 / 16 / 15.3 / 13.6 \mathrm{dBm}, O P_{1 d B}$ of 15.9/15/13.9/12.4 dBm, max. PAE of 23.3/23.1/22.5/16.9 %, and PAE@ $P_{1 d B}$ of 22.4/22.2/21.8/16.3% at 24/28/37/39 GHz. These measurement results are compared with post-layout parasitics extracted (PEX) simulations, and with other state-of-the-art broadband mm-Wave 5G PAs in the literature.