Synthesis Technique for Low-Loss mm-Wave T/R Combiners for TDD Front-Ends

A time-division duplex (TDD) transmit/receive (T/R) millimeter-wave (mm-wave) front-end comprises a power amplifier (PA), a low-noise amplifier (LNA), an antenna switch, and appropriate passive matching and combining networks. In this paper, a synthesis methodology is proposed that minimizes the overall losses by combining the PA output and the LNA input matching networks together with the T/R switch into one network. The technique improves mm-wave transceiver performance in terms of PA efficiency and LNA noise figure. The proposed T/R combiner can achieve high linearity and can handle large PA output voltage swings. The architecture can be implemented in any process which provides high integration capability. A Ka-band implementation is demonstrated using 45 nm CMOS silicon-on-insulator that includes a high power, four-stack-based PA and an inductively source-degenerated cascode-based LNA. Within the front-end, the PA achieves saturated output power of 23.6 dBm with peak power added efficiency of 28%, while the LNA achieves NF of 3.2 dB. The overall chip area is 0.54 mm
²
, including pads.