UC Santa Barbara

In the demand of high data rate wireless transformation, bandwidth is a expensive resource. Thanks to the modern process that improves the ft and fmax beyond several hundreds gigahertz, the wireless communication could transfer data with wide bandwidth by using mm wave carrier frequency. In the coming fifth generation (5G) wireless communication system that using mm wave band as carrier frequency, the number of base station increases to 3 times or even more comparing to the 4G. And in this system, the most power consumption is dominated by the power amplifier.

This dissertation describes the design methodology of mm wave PA. In order to improve the peak efficiency, an inductive coupling neutralization method is demonstrated in class-B stack FET PA design with measurement result in chapter 3. To improve the average drain efficiency, a constant envelope outphasing PA is described in chapter 4 with showing the limitation on outphasing topology for mm-wave band. To further improve the PAE, a 39GHz CMOS SOI PA is described in chapter 5. For sixth generation (6G), an InP HBT common-base PA with record peak efficiency is demonstrated.