In recent years, the demand for the wireless connectivity is increasing and leads to the research into the above 100GHz design. Developments have been made with the circuit and technologies to make the circuit operate at 100GHz. The current availability of silicon-based technologies providing devices with ft/fmax frequencies exceeding 300-GHz allows targeting above 100GHz for commercial telecom links.
The project presents an automated design approach that utilizes “Ocean” and “Skill” code to automate parts of the design flow of the mm-wave power amplifier. The Ocean script, the scripting language used by the cadence environment to control the simulations, together with Matlab is applied for data handling and to automate lots of the recurring simulations. The Skill-code, which under the cadence’s environment is applied to automatically generate the tunable layouts to realize a DRC conform circuit design.
The design of a 170-GHz Power Amplifier in 0.13-μm SiGe BiCMOS applied the automation design flow is presented in this thesis. The gain-stage characteristics such as gain, stability, power-added-efficiency, saturated output power or 1dB-Compression are automatically generated and plotted. Specifically, this 170-GHz PA achieves a 15dB power gain and 11.7dBm output 1dB compression point.