A Fully Monolithic BiCMOS Envelope-Tracking Power Amplifier With On-Chip Transformer for Broadband Wireless Applications

Author

Li, Yan ; Lopez, Jerry ; Wu, Ruili ; Lie, Donald Y C

Author_Institution

Dept. of Electr. & Comput. Eng., Texas Tech Univ., Lubbock, TX, USA

Volume

22

Issue

6

fYear

2012

fDate

6/1/2012 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

288

Lastpage

290

Abstract

This letter presents a power-combined BiCMOS power amplifier (PA) system using envelope-tracking (ET) to serve as a fully monolithic solution for high peak-to-average ratio (PAR) broadband signals. The system consists of two cascode unit PAs combined by an on-chip transformer and modulated by a single envelope modulator. Without needing predistortion, the maximum linear output power of 24.6 dBm/23.8 dBm/23.2 dBm can be achieved with overall power-added-efficiency (PAE) of 26%/24%/22.5% for the LTE 16QAM 5 MHz/LTE 16QAM 10 MHz/WiMAX 64QAM 5 MHz signals at 1.9 GHz. The proposed power-combined ET-PA is fabricated in the TSMC 0.35 μm SiGe BiCMOS technology.

Keywords

BiCMOS analogue integrated circuits; Ge-Si alloys; UHF power amplifiers; modulators; transformers; LTE 16QAM signals; PAE; PAR broadband signals; SiGe; TSMC BiCMOS technology; WiMAX 64QAM signals; broadband wireless applications; cascode unit; efficiency 22.5 percent; efficiency 24 percent; efficiency 26 percent; frequency 1.9 GHz; frequency 5 MHz; fully monolithic BiCMOS envelope-tracking power amplifier; on-chip transformer; peak-to-average ratio broadband signals; power-added-efficiency; power-combined BiCMOS PA system; power-combined BiCMOS power amplifier system; power-combined ET-PA; single envelope modulator; size 0.35 mum; BiCMOS integrated circuits; CMOS integrated circuits; Linearity; Modulation; Noise; Peak to average power ratio; WiMAX; Envelope-tracking (ET); envelope modulator; on-chip transformer; power-combined power amplifier (PA);

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Microwave and Wireless Components Letters, IEEE

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

1531-1309

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/LMWC.2012.2197820

Filename

6202374