A. Wentzel, M. Hossain, D. Stoppel, N. Weimann, V. Krozer, and W. Heinrich

Published in:

Proc. 11th European Microwave Integrated Circuits Conf. (EuMIC 2016), London, UK, Oct. 3-4, pp. 21-24 (2016).

Abstract:

This paper presents for the first time a high-efficiency W-band power amplifier (PA), the design of which follows the digital PA (DPA) design concept. The PA is realized as MMIC in a 0.8 µm InP DHBT transferred-substrate (TS) process. It utilizes a double-emitter-finger DHBT unit cell with an emitter area of 2 × 0.8 × 6 µm². In contrast to the usual W-band PAs the single-stage DPA MMIC does not apply any special reactive matching for the transistor, which leads to a very compact chip size of 0.27 mm². It includes a band-pass filter (BPF) at the output with 0.6  B insertion loss and 24 dB input return loss at the signal frequency of 95 GHz. Applying an overdriven sinusoidal input signal the DPA achieves a maximum output power of 14.4 dBm and a power-added efficiency (PAE) of 31%. Collector efficiencies of more than 80% demonstrate the great potential of the digital PA concept for future high-speed communications.

Keywords:

InP DHBT, transferred substrate, monolithic microwave integrated circuit (MMIC), digital, power amplifier (PA), band-pass filter (BPF).

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