SiGe MMIC power amplifier with on-chip lineariser for X-band applications

Abstract

An X-band linear power amplifier with an on-chip lineariser is developed using a 0.25 mu m SiGe HBT BiCMOS process. The proposed on-chip lineariser improves the 1 dB compression to as much as 3.4 dB with no additional DC power consumption. Under a 3.3 V DC power supply, the single-stage cascode amplifier shows a measured small-signal gain of 12.2 dB and output P1 dB of 20.8 dBm, with power added efficiency of 27.4% at the operating frequency range 8.5-10.5 GHz.