Two-Way Current Combining Power Amplifier with Multi-Stage Adaptive Bias Control

A two-way transformer-based current combining power amplifier (PA) with the proposed multi-stage adaptive bias control scheme has been designed and fabricated in a 90-nm CMOS process. The prototype achieves a linear gain of 13.6 dB with a 3-dB bandwidth of 13 GHz from 40 GHz to 53 GHz. The output 1-dB compression point (OP
_1dB
) is over 11 dBm from 42 GHz to 46 GHz. The peak power-added-efficiency (PAE) is 10.5
^%
and PAE at OP
_1dB
is 8.3% while the saturation output power is 13.7 dBm and the OP
_1dB
is 11.8 dBm.