A +27dBm Psat 27dB Gain W-Band Power Amplifier in 0.1µm GaAs

In this work a W-Band power amplifier is presented in 0.1 µm GaAs pHEMT. The amplifier is composed of 1×4 and 1×8 driving stages for high gain and of three successive 1×8 power stages for high power. The stages were designed using a developed generic unconditionally stable unit cell. The output combiner was designed very efficiently with only 0.75 dB insertion loss to present each active device with Zopt. The amplifier has a small-signal gain above 25 dB and more than 26 dBm Psat over 93–102 GHz. Due to the chosen topology, the amplifier presents a rapid saturation achieving almost Psat after 6 dB compression. The PA demonstrates a peak output power of 27.3 dBm between 96–98 GHz. The measured PAE is around 12% over 93–102 GHz. It is the first power amplifier in GaAs demonstrating 0.5W of output power above 90GHz. The chip size is 3×3 mm² including pads.