A 1.53-mm ² Fully Integrated Wi-Fi 7 Front-End Module With 1.65-dB NF and 41.9% FBW in 0.25-μm GaAs p-HEMT Technology

This letter presents a highly integrated front-end module (FEM) in 0.25-<inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mu $</tex-math> </inline-formula>m gallium arsenide (GaAs) pseudomorphic high-electron-mobility transistor (p-HEMT) process for Wi-Fi 7 applications. The design incorporates a wideband low-noise amplifier (LNA) with a feedforward capacitor structure (FCS) demonstrating 74% fractional bandwidth (FBW) and 1.65–2.3-dB noise figure, a three-stage nonlinear power amplifier (PA) with dynamic bias optimization achieving 16.2–16.5-dBm output power and 8.5% power-added efficiency (PAE) at −43-dB error vector magnitude (EVM) for 320-MHz 4096-QAM signals under digital predistortion (DPD) and a co-designed switch with absorptive electrostatic discharge (ESD) protection supporting human body model (HBM) 2 kV. The measured results show small-signal gains of 11.9–13.9 and 28.5–31.5 dB in receive (RX) and transmit (TX) modes across 4.9–7.5 GHz. Implemented in the smallest reported die area of <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$0.9\times 1.7$</tex-math> </inline-formula> mm<sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup>, this work demonstrates superior integration density and performance for next-generation Wi-Fi systems.