An $X$ -Band 29.6-dBm CMOS Power Amplifier Using Folded Radial Splitter and Binary Combiner Network

An X-band fully integrated power amplifier (PA) has been designed and fabricated on CMOS technology. Utilizing a transformer-based folded radial power splitter and binary power combiner network, the CMOS PA delivers 29.6 dBm saturation power (P
_sat
) at 11 GHz. The measured gain is 11.2 dB, the output of 1-dB compression point (O P1 dB) is 28.2 dBm, and the peak power-added efficiency (PAE) is 15.5% at 11 GHz. To our knowledge, the PA achieves the highest Psat and the highest O P1 dB among other reported CMOS PAs around X-band to date.