A 22-42GHz 28nm CMOS SOI 3:1 VSWR Resilient Balanced Power Amplifier for 5G Application

This paper presents a broadband balanced power amplifier (PA) implemented in a 28 nm CMOS FD-SOI process with a compact size of 0.82 m$\mathrm{m}^{2}$ for mm-wave 5G application. Through the use of a dual-resonant transformer, the power amplifier operates over a relative bandwidth of 62.5% between 22 and 42 GHz. Thanks to its balanced architecture, the PA shows a great robustness to active voltage standing wave ratio (VSWR). The PA exhibits 20.7 dBm$\mathrm{P}_{\mathrm{s}\mathrm{a}\mathrm{t}}$ with 34.2% peak PAE and 16% PA$\mathrm{E}_{6\mathrm{d}\mathrm{B}}$PBO at 28 GHz. In the 22-42 GHz frequency band, the PAE
max
and $\mathrm{P}_{\mathrm{s}\mathrm{a}\mathrm{t}}$ of the PA remain above 20% and 18 dBm, respectively. Over the entire frequency band, the peak PAE and $\mathrm{P}_{\mathrm{s}\mathrm{a}\mathrm{t}}$ drop by only 12% and 2.0 dB between the optimal case 50 $\Omega$ and the worst cases at 3:1 VSWR. Using a 200 MHz 64-QAM 3GPP NR FR2 signal at 28 GHz, the proposed PA achieves 12.2 dBm average output power and 11.8% average PAE. For a 0.72 Gb/s(120MHz) single carrier (SC) 64-QAM signal at 28 GHz, the PA achieves a 15.2 dBm$\mathrm{P}_{\mathrm{a}\mathrm{v}\mathrm{g}}$ and 18% PA$\mathrm{E}_{\mathrm{a}\mathrm{v}\mathrm{g}}$.