SiGe BiCMOS Ka-band Integrated Transmitter for SatCom Phased-Array Applications

This paper presents a 27-33 GHz SiGe transmitter for SatCom phased-array system. The circuit has been developed in 130-nm SiGe:C BiCMOS technology and fully characterized. It consists of an active Up-conversion IQ-Mixer followed by a Power Amplifier. Input IF signals (I, Q) are in the range of 200 to 800 MHz and the LO chain integrates a X6 frequency multiplier driven by an external LO between 4.5 and 5.5 GHz. The Ka-band transmitter achieves 39.3 dB peak conversion gain, 10.7 dBm peak output 1-dB compression point (OPldB), and an OIP3 better than 22 dBm within the entire operating frequency band. The maximum power consumption is 349 mW and the chip size is 2602 $\mu$m× 1644$\mu$m, pads included.