Distributed Power Amplifiers Circuit Techniques for Wideband RF, Millimeter-Waves and Optical Wireline

Generating and maintaining power from distributed power amplifiers (DPAs) usually involve compromises between gain, bandwidth, linearity and chip area. The talk discusses several active and passive design techniques, introduced to break the gain-bandwidth and power bandwidth trade-offs in DPAs. Specifically, we will focus on multi-drive techniques for stacked transistors, active and passive design scaling, area optimization, and stability for cascaded DPAs reaching over 4 THz of GBW. We will discuss the performance of optimized PMOS-Only DPAs with over 100 GHz bandwidth. The addition of PMOS is therefore leveraged to implement fully complimentary DPA/modulator driver structures operating efficiently from true-DC with wide-band linearity enhancement techniques for 100+ Gbps in both wireless and wireline modulations.