A 200–225 GHz SiGe Power Amplifier with peak Psat of 9.6 dBm using wideband power combination

A 200-225 GHz SiGe combiner Power Amplifier (PA) based on a wideband 4-way power combiner architecture is presented in this paper. The circuit is implemented in a 130 nm SiGe BiCMOS technology with f
_T
/f
_max
of 250/370 GHz. A parallel power combining architecture based on the low-loss transmission line based zero-degree combiner is used to combine the power from 4 PA cores. At 215 GHz, the P
_sat
is 9.6 dBm and from 200-225 GHz the average P
_sat
is 9 dBm. From 200-225 GHz, the combiner enhances the P
_sat
from the unit PA cores by 3.5-4 dB. For this circuit, the peak small signal gain is 25 dB at 213 GHz. To the best of the authors knowledge, this is the highest reported output power for silicon PAs above 200 GHz.