A V-Band Power Amplifier with 28.2% PAE and 21.4 dBm Output Power in 65-nm CMOS

This work presents a CMOS broadband millimeter-wave power amplifier (PA) based on 65-nm CMOS process. The PA includes two stages of common-source (CS) driver amplifiers along with one cascode stage. The PA utilizes the gain compensation near the compression point in the second-stage driver and the power stage to improve linearity while maintaining gain. Simulation results show that the proposed PA achieves a peak gain (S21) of 22.3 dB with a 3-dB bandwidth ranging from 52.5 to 81.5 GHz. The PA achieves 28.2% peak power added efficiency (peak PAE), 21.4 dBm saturated output power (Psat), and 20.3 dBm output 1-dB compression point (OP1dB) with 26.2% power added efficiency (PAE).