A fully-integrated Ka-band CMOS power amplifier with Psat of 20 dBm and PAE of 19%

This paper presents a 27.5-28.5 GHz Ka-band power amplifier fabricated with 0.13 pm CMOS process. A small inter-stage inductor between the cascode common-source and common-gate is designed to improve PA's output power and PAE. A vertical coupling input and output balun with low insertion loss are designed to simultaneously perform impedance transformation and differential to single-ended conversion. The power amplifier achieves a saturated output power (Psat) of 20 dBm and a maximum power gain (G) of 22.6 dB, the peak value of the power added efficiency (PAE) is 19 %.