Highly-Efficient Broadband Medium Power Amplifier Design in 22nm CMOS FD-SOI for mm-Wave 5G

We present in this work a reconfigurable broadband highly-efficient medium-power power amplifier (PA) design in 22nm FD-SOI for potential millimeter-wave (mm-Wave) 5G (5
^th
Generation) applications. The broadband PA is targeted to cover the key part of the 5G FR2 band (i.e., 24.25 to 43.5 GHz), with P
_OUT
~16 dBm and high power-added-efficiency (PAE) and excellent linearity. The post-layout parasitic extracted (R+C+CC) simulations performed in Calibre suggest this PA reaches max. PAE > 35% around 20 GHz, while still maintaining higher than 16% max. PAE across the entire 20 GHz - 50 GHz band. Using an LTE 64-QAM modulated 250 MHz input at 28 GHz, this design boasts an impressive simulated linearity performance with ACLR
^1-
/ACLR
¹⁺
= -36.6/-36.2 dBc at P
_OUT
= 11.4 dBm. With the broadband, high PAE and linearity performance, this reconfigurable CMOS PA appears attractive for potential mmWave 5G applications.