A Compact Single-Ended Common-Base Doherty PA in 90-nm BiCMOS With 37.3% Peak PAE for 5G Beamforming Arrays
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article presents a back-off efficient power amplifier (PA) for mm-wave 5G and upcoming 6G beamforming phased array transceivers (PATs), incorporating advanced circuit designs and novel implementations in both passive and active components. Conventional back-off efficient PAs in the mm-wave frequency range occupy a large chip area, making it hard to fit them into PATs. To overcome this issue, we propose a compact back-off efficient Doherty PA (DPA) with a common base (CB) structure as the core of the PA and small low-loss passive elements. In addition, the proposed architecture moves the role of the input hybrid coupler to the interstage matching network while maintaining DPA functionality. The interstage matching provides the required phases for the main and auxiliary PAs, power division, and impedance matching. The PA prototype is fabricated in the GlobalFoundries 90-nm BiCMOS (9 HP) process. It achieves a peak gain of 20.4 dB at 28.45 GHz with a 1-dB bandwidth of 4.45 GHz. Under large-signal conditions, it archives >19.5-dBm <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$P_{\mathrm { sat}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> with >36% <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\text {PAE}_{\mathrm { sat}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>. Its <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$P_{1\text {dB}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> at 26, 28, and 30 GHz are 19.4, 19.3, and 19.3 dBm with 38.5%, 37.3%, and 36.8% <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\text {PAE}_{1\, \text {dB}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>, respectively. In the 6-dB power back-off region, it reaches efficiencies of 29.1%, 31.1%, and 29.3% at 26, 28, and 30 GHz, respectively. When tested with the NR-FR2 test model at these frequencies, the PA achieves <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$P_{\mathrm { avg}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> of 8.25, 8.45, and 8 dBm, and <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\text {PAE}_{\mathrm { avg}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> of 13.9%, 14.5%, and 13.7% for a 400 M 1-CC 64-QAM signal, maintaining an rms error vector magnitude (<inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\text {EVM}_{\mathrm { rms}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>) of −25.8, −25.8, and −25.7 dB. In addition, in adjacent channel power ratio (ACPR) tests, the PA achieves −27, −26.2, and −30.8 dBc on the lower side and −28.4, −28.5, and −27.6 dBc on the higher side channels at 26, 28, and 30 GHz, respectively.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".