Design of an Ultra-Compact 60-GHz Bi-Directional Amplifier in 65-nm CMOS

This letter presents an ultra-compact two-stage 60-GHz differential bi-directional amplifier (DBA) design in a 65-nm CMOS process. To satisfy the stability and gain requirements, a differential neutralized bi-directional common-source gain cell combined with the cross-coupled gm-boosting technique is proposed. In addition, a layout-symmetrical coupled line transformer is used as the inter-stage matching network to achieve broadband operation, reducing insertion loss and ensuring identical responses in both forward/backward modes. The proposed DBA achieves a peak gain of 16.1 dB with a 3-dB bandwidth of 15 GHz (52–67 GHz), maximum OP $_{\mathrm {1 \,\,dB}}$ of 5.1 dBm, $P_{\mathrm {SAT}}$ of 9.6 dBm, a peak PAE of 11.5% at 62 GHz, respectively, consuming 70 mW from a power supply of 1.2 V. The circuit core occupies an ultra-compact area of only 0.0675 mm².