A 15.5-46.0 GHz Broadband Power Amplifier with 19.0-22.0 dBm Psat and 30.0% Peak PAEmax in 28nm Bulk CMOS

This paper proposed a broadband power amplifier (PA) in 28-nm CMOS technology with a high-efficiency matching network. The output matching network achieves a passive efficiency greater than 65% over 17.2-50.8 GHz. Based on the matching network, the proposed PA demonstrates saturation power (Psat) of 19.0 to 22.0 dBm over 15.5-46.0 GHz with a peak PAEmax of 30%. Under 600-MHz 256-QAM signal, the PA achieves Pavg of 13.3 dBm and PAEavg of 6.1% with EVM/ACLR of -32.5 dB/-30.9 dBc at 25 GHz, which indicates that the PA is a good candidate for mm-wave high-speed wireless communication systems.