A high-PAE high-gain 24-GHz fully integrated 0.18-µm CMOS power amplifier using micromachined inductors

A 24-GHz 0.18-μm CMOS power amplifier (PA) with high power-added efficiency (PAE) and high gain is proposed in this paper. This PA comprises two stages, the first stage is the single-ended triple-cascode stage for gain boosting, and the second stage is the differential power stage for output power enhancement. To further improve the PA performance in terms of power gain and PAE, the fully integrated micromachined inductors are adopted in this work. Based on these approaches, the proposed PA delivers 21.2-dBm saturated output power (Psat), and 24-dB power gain, and 16% PAE. Compared to recently published K-band 0.18-μm CMOS PAs, this proposed PA achieves the superior PAE and power gain.