An E-band Bidirectional PALNA in 0.13 µm SiGe BiCMOS Technology

This paper presents an E-band bidirectional power amplifier and low-noise amplifier (PALNA) in a 0.13 µm SiGe BiCMOS technology. In the transmit mode, the LNA is isolated through the impedance matching network with enabler setting. In the receive mode, the input of the PA is isolated by matching network with enabler setting while the output of the PA is isolated by a differential switch to have minimal effect on the noise figure (NF) and input matching of the LNA. The measured PALNA achieves a peak gain of 24.3 dB at 72 GHz with a 3 dB bandwidth from 64 GHz to 85 GHz in the receive mode. The measured NF is 5.8 dB at 74 GHz. In the transmit mode, the differential PA results in 19.5 dB peak gain at 76 GHz and +9.2 dBm of saturated power at 74 GHz. The overall chip size is 1.25 mm
²
. The PALNA consumes a DC power of 19 mW and 131 mW in the receive and transmit mode, respectively. The designed bidirectional PALNA is suitable for a half-duplex system with shared Tx/Rx antenna.