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Concentric Parallel Combining Balun for Millimeter-Wave Power Amplifier in Low-Power CMOS with High-Power Density

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Abstract

This paper presents a novel balun for a millimeter-wave power amplifier (PA) design to achieve high-power density in a 65-nm low-power (LP) CMOS process. By using a concentric winding technique, the proposed parallel combining balun with compact size accomplishes power combining and unbalance-balance conversion concurrently. For calculating its power combination efficiency in the condition of various amplitude and phase wave components, a method basing on S-parameters is derived. Based on the proposed parallel combining balun, a fabricated 60-GHz industrial, scientific, and medical (ISM) band PA with single-ended I/O achieves an 18.9-dB gain and an 8.8-dBm output power at 1-dB compression and 14.3-dBm saturated output power (P sat) at 62 GHz. This PA occupying only a 0.10-mm2 core area has demonstrated a high-power density of 269.15 mW/mm2 in 65 nm LP CMOS.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Globalfoundries for chip fabrication and Singapore EDB for research financial support.

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Correspondence to Jiang-An Han.

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Han, JA., Kong, ZH., Ma, K. et al. Concentric Parallel Combining Balun for Millimeter-Wave Power Amplifier in Low-Power CMOS with High-Power Density. J Infrared Milli Terahz Waves 37, 1096–1105 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10762-016-0300-y

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