A V-band self-healing power amplifier with adaptive feedback bias control in 65 nm CMOS

A self-healing two-stage 60 GHz power amplifier (PA) with amplitude/phase compensation is realized in 65 nm CMOS. An adaptive feedback bias scheme with three control knobs is proposed to extend the linear operating region and enhance chip-to-chip performance yield; allowing a 5.5 dB improvement of the output 1-dB compression point (P
_1dB
) and a less than 2% chip-to-chip gain variation. At a 1 V supply, the fully differential PA achieves a saturation output power (P
_sat
) of 14.85 dBm with a peak power-added-efficiency (PAE) of 16.2%. With the on-chip amplitude compensation, the P
_1dB
is extended to 13.7 dBm. With the on-chip phase compensation, the output phase variation is minimized to less than 0.5 degree. To the best of our knowledge, this PA provides the highest P
_sat
and P
_1dB
with simultaneous high PAE for a single PA reported to date. The PA delivers a linear gain of 9.7 dB and has a 7 GHz bandwidth from 55.5 to 62.5 GHz with a very compact area of 0.042 mm
²
.