A 20dBm E-band power amplifier in SiGe BiCMOS technology

This paper presents a fully integrated 71-76 GHz power amplifiers (PA) fabricated in a 0.12 μm SiGe BiCMOS technology. The PA employs five common-emitter stages with on-chip power combining to achieve power gain of 21 dB, 17.6 dBm output power at 1 dB compression, and saturated power of 20.1 dBm. The modified Wilkinson combiner that was used shows 0.5 dB insertion loss. Small signal characteristics of the amplifier show peak gain at 72 GHz with 3 dB bandwidth of 17GHz (24%). The PA's bias is applied using digitally adjustable PTAT bias circuits and it consumes quiescent currents of 140 mA from a 2 V supply and 280 mA at 1 dB compression.