A Ka-Band Power Amplifier in 130 nm SiGe using an Efficient Matching Network Design Method

This paper presents the design of a very compact Ka-Band power amplifier (PA) in 130 nm silicon germanium (SiGe) BiCMOS achieving an output power of 23.7 dBm and a power added efficiency (PAE) of 40% in class AB operation. A high performance is achieved through an improved approach on finding an optimized L/C-based matching network. Using this approach practical network efficiency limits can be calculated for all possible impedance transformations, enabling the assessment of network loss during the design process of power amplifiers.