A 22FDX® 2 Stack Power Amplifier for 5G Applications with 19dBm Psat and 49% Peak PAE

In this work, a 2 Stack cascode Power Amplifier (PA), for 5G applications at 28GHz has been designed and fabricated with 22nm FDX technology from GlobalFoundries. An enhanced device variant of Super Low Voltage Threshold (SLVT) called ENBFMOAT is used. The architecture of PA is based on pseudo differential 2 stack cascode with on chip input and output baluns. A new layout design style has been improved to mitigate the phase delays. Moreover, connecting the Nwell to front gate to strength the ground plane. A sandwiched output balun style is utilized to increase the coupling and reduce the loss. All these improvements provided us with 19dBm linear output power (P
sat
) and peak Power Added efficiency (PAE) of 49%. The reliability for 10 years is also investigated and ensured the long life PA working time efficiently. To best authors knowledge, the presented PA introduced the highest PAE combined with P
sat
in CMOS/SOI technology.