A High-Gain mm-Wave Amplifier Design: An Analytical Approach to Power Gain Boosting

In this paper, a general embedding is proposed to boost the power gain of any device to the maximum achievable gain (G
_max
), which is defined as the maximum theoretical gain of the device. Using a gain-plane based analysis, two linear-lossless-reciprocal embeddings are used to perform a movement from the coordinate of the transistor to the coordinate that corresponds to G
_max
. The proposed embedding is applied to a 10 μm common-source NMOS transistor, and the theoretical and simulation results are presented and compared. The properties of the embedded transistor are inspected, and the few issues in implementation are investigated and addressed. Finally, using the proposed general embedding, an amplifier is implemented in a 65 nm CMOS process with a measured power gain of 9.2 dB at 260 GHz, which is the highest frequency reported in any silicon-based amplifier.