Switchable V-band Power Amplifier with Ultra-Fast Turn-On for Aggressive Duty-Cycling

Aggressive duty-cycling is an approach to reduce the DC power demand of wireless networks. Turning off the power hungry blocks as often and as long as possible requires them to have fast operating point switching (OPS) times with a low energy consumption. This paper presents a V-band SiGe power amplifier (PA) with ultra-fast transition times. An approach of deriving the turn-on/off times is proposed and a method to measure the energy consumption during the OPS is presented. The single-stage inverse class-E PA achieves a power-added-efficiency (PAE) of 24.8% and an output power of 8.5 dBm at 54 GHz and 2 dBm available source power. It reaches these continuous-wave characteristics within 7.3 ns and a single OPS cycle consumes about 100 pJ.