Design of Single-Ended and Differential Power Amplifiers using SiGe HBT for SATCOM Applications

This paper presents the load-pull measured performance of two cascode power cells along with simulation performance of two matched power amplifiers (PAs) at Ku-band for Satcom applications. The two cascode power cells are fabricated in 130-nm SiGe BiCMOS technology. At 18GHz, Load-pull measurements show 18.6dBm/19.5dBm of output power with 48.3%/51.2% of PAE at P1dB/P3dB. A single-ended PA and a differential matched PAs are designed using the cascode power cells as building blocks. Simulation results show that the single-ended PA achieves an 18.5dB of small signal gain and 20.5dBm of output power with 44% PAE at 3dB compression point. Using EM simulated low-loss baluns at input and output, the differential PA has shown 5dB improvement in small signal gain with similar large signal performance.