A 150-GHz Transmitter With 12-dBm Peak Output Power Using 130-nm SiGe:C BiCMOS Process

This article presents a compact 150-GHz transmitter with 12-dBm P-sat and 17-dB conversion gain. This D-band transmitter is composed of a frequency doubler, a micromixer, a two-stage g(m)-boosting power amplifier (PA), and an on-chip dielectric resonate (DR) antenna. At sub-terahertz, the output power and the gain are the limiting factors for the transmitter's performance. In this work, g(m)-boosting topology is implemented to achieve the 17-dB gain by taking advantage of the base inductor without sacrificing the PA's stability. The output power of the 150-GHz PA is enhanced by the proposed phase compensation method. In this proposed method, an auxiliary inductor is added for adjusting the phase difference to decrease the introduced loss from power combining and matching networks. The imbalance at the LO port is also reduced by the proposed capacitor and the resistor compensation method. From 140 to 160 GHz, the transmitter delivers more than 8-dBm output power, with the maximum P-sat of 12 dBm at 148 GHz. This transmitter exhibits a conversion gain of 17 dB and an output 1-dB compression point (OP1 dB) of 11.4 dBm. The transmitter exhibits the highest output power, the highest OP1 dB, competitive conversion gain, and bandwidth among any silicon-based transmitters in D-band, to the best of our knowledge.