Abstract
The secured short-range communication, such as IEEE 802.15 particularly for personal area network (PANs), draws great attentions recently. 60-GHz applications are exploited since this spectrum experiences strong attenuation in the air that makes the wireless local area network (WLAN) and wireless personal area network (WPAN) more secured. Among the millimeter-wave integrated circuits, power amplifiers are the most starving and difficult to design due to its large-signal operation and non-linearity by nature. In this thesis, three V-band power amplifiers (PAs) are proposed and two of them (work B and C) are implemented by TSMC 90-nm 1P9M (GUTM) CMOS process. The first design (work A) presents one new idea of multi-stage adaptive biasing technique that is different from conventional adaptive biasing scheme on power stage and this technique focuses more on the enhancement in the back-off efficiency verified in simulations. Based on the first design, the new adaptive biasing technique is realized in work B. It achieves a power gain of 17.1 dB, an output 1-dB compression point (OP1dB) of 6.1 dBm, and a maximum power-added-efficiency (PAE) of 16.1% at 48 GHz. To further enhance the delivered output power, the last work (work C) combines the proposed adaptive biasing circuits and transformer-based power combining technique. Work C presents a linear gain of 13.4 dB, an output saturation power (Psat) of 13.66 dBm and a peak PAE of 10.16%. At 1-dB compression point, OP1dB and PAE1dB are 11.6 dBm and 8.3%, respectively.