A High-Efficiency 142-182-GHz SiGe BiCMOS Power Amplifier With Broadband Slotline-Based Power Combining Technique

In this article, a high-efficiency broadband millimeter-wave (mm-Wave) integrated power amplifier (PA) with a low-loss slotline-based power combing technique is proposed. The proposed slotline-based power combiner consists of grounded coplanar waveguide (GCPW)-to-slotline transitions and folded slots to simultaneously achieve power combining and impedance matching. This technique provides a broadband parallel-series combining method to enhance the output power of PAs at mm-Wave frequencies while maintaining the compact area and high efficiency. As a proof of concept, a compact four-to-one hybrid power combiner is implemented in a 130-nm SiGe BiCMOS back-end-of-line (BEOL) process, which leads to a small die area of 126 mu m x 240 mu m and a low measured insertion loss of 0.5 dB. The 3-dB bandwidth is over 80 GHz covering the whole G-band (140-220 GHz). Based on this structure, a high-efficiency mm-Wave PA has been fabricated in the 130-nm SiGe BiCMOS technology. The three-stage PA achieves a peak power gain of 30.7 dB, 3-dB small-signal gain bandwidth of 40 GHz from 142 to 182 GHz, a measured maximum saturated output power of 18.1 dBm, and a peak power-added efficiency (PAE) of 12.4% at 161 GHz. The extremely compact power combining methodology leads to a small core area of 488 mu m x 214 mu m and an output power per unit die area of 662 mW/mm(2).