mmWave Spatial–Temporal Single Harmonic Switching Transmitter Arrays for High Back-Off Beamforming Efficiency

This article presents a spatial–temporal single harmonic switching (STHS) transmitter array architecture with enhanced efficiency in the power back-off (PBO) region. STHS is an electromagnetic circuit co-designed and jointly optimized transmitter array that realizes beamforming and back-off power generation at the same time. The temporal dimension is originally added in STHS to achieve back-off efficiency enhancement, which can be combined with conventional PBO enhancement methods such as Doherty amplifiers and envelope tracking. The design is validated through a simulation of a two-stage power amplifier (PA) in 65-nm CMOS at 77 GHz, which achieves a peak drain efficiency (DE) of 24.2%, a 22% DE at 3 dB PBO, 16% DE at 6 dB PBO, and 10.2% at 9 dB PBO. The efficiency exhibits a 57% improvement at 3 dB PBO, 100% improvement at 6 dB PBO, and 190% improvement at 9 dB PBO compared with class A/B amplifiers.