Design Procedure for Millimeter-wave InP DHBT Stacked Power Amplifiers

The stacked-transistor concept for power amplifiers (PA) has been investigated in this work. Specifically, this architecture has been applied in the design of millimeter-wave monolithic microwave integrated circuits (MMICs) using indium phosphide (InP) double heterojunction bipolar transistors (DHBTs). In this paper we describe the design methodology adopted and the results obtained at 86 GHz and 140 GHz. In the former case, 14.5 dBm of output power at the compression point, 14.5 dB of gain and 19.6 % of PAE are obtained from a four-transistor power cell. At 140 GHz, the same architecture gives 13.1 dBm of output power, 10.1 dB of gain and 13 % of PAE. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first investigation of multi-level stacked PAs based on InP HBT technology.