Large Fractional Bandwidth D-Band Power Amplifier for 6G Communications in 130-nm SiGe BiCMOS Technology

This paper presents two wideband power amplifiers (PA) for future 6G wireless communications. One-way and two-way stagger-tuned PAs are designed and fabricated in 130-nm SiGe BiCMOS technology with heterojunction bipolar transistors (HBT) with f<inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">t</inf>/f<inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">max</inf> of 300 GHz and 450 GHz, respectively. Large-signal wideband operation of the one-way PA is achieved by a transformer-based output power matching. A high magnetic coupling power combining transformer and balun is utilized for the output power matching of the two-way PA leading to wideband yet low-loss matching. The one-way PA covers the entire D-band in terms of 3-dB bandwidth. It achieves an output P<inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1dB</inf> of 11 dBm and a maximum PAE of 5%. The two-way PA has a 3-dB bandwidth of 48 GHz centered around 140 GHz. It delivers linear power up to 13 dBm. The one- and two-way PAs show a gain of 30 dB and 22 dB, and their cores occupy a silicon area of 0.145 mm<sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> and 0.2 mm<sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup>, respectively.