Two W-Band Wideband CMOS mmW PAs for Automotive Radar Transceivers

This paper presents two 55-nm CMOS power amplifiers (PAs) for W-band automotive radar applications. To reduce the parasitic capacitance, inductance and resistance of large-sized transistors, a customized millimeter-wave (mmW) power cell optimizing both the transistor structure and the connection with its surrounding components is developed. An in-situ transformer-coupled resonating peak control (RPC) technique taking into account the transistor parasitics is also proposed to achieve overall optimized bandwidth and gain. The PAs employ a cascode structure and adopt a common-gate-shorting technique to improve stability and output power. A 1-way differential PA is designed and achieves a 3-dB bandwidth (BW) of 9 GHz, a
$\mathrm{P}_{sat}$
of 15.5 dBm and a peak PAE of 12.5%. Through current-mode power combining, a 2-way PA achieves a BW of 16 GHz, a
$\mathrm{P}_{sat}$
of 18 dBm and a peak PAE of 12.6%.