A V-Band Doubly Hybrid NMOS/PMOS Four-Way Distributed-Active-Transformer Power Amplifier for Nonlinearity Cancellation and Joint Linearity/Efficiency Optimization

This paper presents a millimeter-wave power amplifier that utilizes a doubly hybrid NMOS/PMOS nonlinearity cancellation technique, demonstrating superior PA linearity performance with extremely low AM-AM and AM-PM distortions. It covers the V-band frequencies of 50.4GHz-58GHz with 35.4% maximum PAE, 16.3dBm saturated power, and only 0.4° AM-PM distortion at the carrier frequency of 55GHz. The measured AM-PM distortion is below 2° over 50-57GHz. Also, this PA supports 64-QAM modulation with 15.6% average PAE and 9.5dBm average output power at 0.5GSym/s (3Gb/s), demonstrating the best PA modulation performance at V-band frequencies below −25dBc rms EVM. Additionally, this is the first V-band PA measured at 64-QAM 3GSym/s (18Gb/s) modulation and 5G NR CP-OFDM 64-QAM FR2 modulations with various modulation bandwidths (e.g., 400MHz and 800MHz) and component-carriers (e.g., 1-CC and 4-CC).