A Ku-band High-Gain CMOS Distributed Power Amplifier Based on Merged Cascaded Distributed Amplifier Architecture

Power amplifiers (PAs) are key components in broadband wireless communication systems. This paper presents a Ku-band (10-18 GHz) CMOS distributed power amplifier (DPA) in 180 nm technology, based on a novel merged cascaded distributed amplifier (MCDA) architecture. This architecture includes a cascade pre-amplifier at the input to provide a multiplicative gain mechanism and a DPA at the output to provide additive gain mechanism using multiple parallel amplification paths. MCDA architecture significantly improves power gain without compromising bandwidth or voltage swing, making it well-suited for wideband applications. The simulation results indicate that the maximum gain is 39.5 at 13 GHz. The maximum power-added efficiency (PAE) is 14.2 % at 10 GHz with an output power at OP1dB of 12.1 dBm, and an output saturation power of 15.1 dBm. S11 and S22 are better than -8.6 dB and -16.2 dB, respectively. Power consumption is 200 mW under a 1.8 V power supply. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, a comparative analysis with previously reported silicon-based DPAs shows that the proposed DPA provides highest record power gain, gain-bandwidth product (GBW), and FoM compared to similar DPAs in silicon-based technologies. The results highlight the effectiveness of the MCDA concept for high-gain CMOS PAs.