A 1–17GHz Stacked Distributed Power Amplifier with 19–21dBm Saturated Output Power in 45nm CMOS SOI Technology

This paper presents a uniform distributed amplifier (DA) based on 45nm CMOS SOI. Four stacked transistors are employed in a single arm to construct a four-stage DA. The wideband distributed amplifier results in a measured maximum gain of 17.1 dB with a 3-dB small-signal bandwidth of 1–17 GHz. The saturated output power is 19–21 dBm at 1–17 GHz, with a peak power-added efficiency (PAE) is 12.2–19%. The DA consumes 97 mA from a 4.4 V supply, and the chip size is only 1.14 mm² including all pads.