A linear 60 GHz 65 nm-CMOS power amplifier realization and characterization for OFDM signal
Abstract
A millimeter-wave Power Amplifier (PA) based on a 65nm CMOS technology from STMicroelectronics has been designed. The targeted feature is the unlicensed band around 60 GHz suitable for wireless personal area network application (WPAN). To optimize the linearity, the PA is designed under class A biasing to have an output compression point (OCP1) close to its saturated Power (P sat). S-parameters and large signal measurement results are demonstrated and compared with electromagnetic simulations. The PA offers a P sat of 8.3 dBm, an OCP1 of 6 dBm and a gain of 6.7 dB. The die area is 0.29 mm2 with pads. Considering those results, one-tone simulations are not sufficient to characterize the linearity performances of the PA in its real conditions of use. Consequently, two-tone simulations are firstly performed. After, linearity figures of merit (FoM) are discussed applying an orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) modulated signal. The PA offers an adjacent channel power ratio (ACPR) of 15 dB and an error vector magnitude (EVM) of 20% at PA compression operating mode.
Keywords
60 GHz Power amplifier OFDM modulation PAPR ACPR EVMNotes
Acknowledgments
The authors acknowledge the foundry support provided by STMicroelectronics. The authors thank Conseil Regional d’Aquitaine for the support of NANOCOM test bench. The technical support for testing was provided by M. De Matos
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