Broadband Linear and Highly-Efficient Millimeter-Wave Power Amplifiers Design in 5G FR2 Band

Monolithic broadband linear and high-efficiency millimeter-wave power amplifiers (mm-Wave PAs) are critically important for realizing low-power, miniaturized wideband mm-Wave phased-array systems, since these PAs can often consume about half of the overall system power budget. This work, therefore, reports fundamental research on the design of broadband mm-Wave PAs in the 5G FR2 Band (i.e., 24-52.6 GHz) in a couple of state-of-the-art semiconductor technologies for potential applications. Specifically, this work takes advantages of a 40 nm GaN/SiC technology and a 22 nm CMOS-FD (fully-depleted) SOI (silicon-on-insulator) process, together with novel integrated circuit (IC) design techniques, to realize highly-efficient broadband mm-Wave PAs in the medium output power range of ~ < 20 dBm, with broad bandwidth (BW) of ‘ 20-30 GHz and excellent broadband peak PAE > ~ 20-40%. We then proceed to report effective and considerable linearity improvement on these PAs using Digital Pre-Distortion (DPD). The data suggests one can design very broadband and linear, highly-efficient mm-Wave PAs that operate across the key 5G FR2 Band.