Wideband power amplifier and low noise amplifier for mm-Wave 5G application

Abstract

The millimeter-wave communication has led to an increased need for the RF blocks covering all the used frequency bands by different countries. Among various RF front-end blocks, the design of a wideband power amplifier (PA) and a wideband low noise amplifier (LNA) was proposed in this work. Designing a wideband PA is challenging because of the frequency band limitation of active/passive devices and linearity enhancement techniques. The staggered tuning technique and wideband output matching were used in the PA to meet the wideband small signal and large signal requirements. Linearity techniques such as the feedback system that linearizes large signal distortion regardless of the operation frequency and 2nd harmonic termination was also used. The gain's measurement result is 21.8 dB with a 3 dB bandwidth of 7.8 GHz and 29 % fractional bandwidth. Measured saturation power is 19.3 dBm and OP1dB is 17.65 dBm. To design a wideband LNA, coupled resonators were used as a matching network. The gm-boosted common-gate structure was used as the 1st stage topology because it’s input impedance is suitable for wideband matching without degrading gain and noise figure performance. The simulation result of gain is 22.3 dB with 57 % fractional bandwidth, and the noise figure is 2.9-3.5 dB.