A two-stage F-band cascode power amplifier with a peak PAE of 17% in SiGe BiCMOS technology

Recently, the requirements in terms of circuit speed have been increasing for many kind of applications and therefore the operating frequencies increase as well. For wireless purposes this comes along with a decreased range, so designing sufficient power amplifier working in the higher frequency band is of particular importance. This paper presents a differential, 2-stage, common-emitter power amplifier with a saturated peak output power of 9 dBm with a 1dB compression point of 8.6 dBm and a peak efficiency of 17 %, while having a low power consumption of only 95 mW. The actual fabricated power amplifier has its peak amplification at a frequency of 102 GHz. As a highly integrated component it occupies only 560 μm×230 μm of active chip area.