A highly efficient SiGe differential power amplifier using an envelope-tracking technique for 3GPP LTE applications

Author

Li, Yan ; Lopez, Jerry ; Lie, Donald Y C ; Chen, Kevin ; Wu, Stanley ; Yang, Tzu-Yin

Author_Institution

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

fYear

2010

Firstpage

121

Lastpage

124

Abstract

This paper presents a highly-efficient polar transmitter (TX) system that adopts the envelope-tacking (ET) technique with a differential SiGe power amplifier (PA) for 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE) applications. The differential PA was designed using a cascode topology, reaching power-added efficiency (PAE) of 50% at output power of 22dBm in continuous wave (CW) mode. The experimental data also shows that the proposed ET-based polar TX system with the cascode PA delivers 21dBm average output power with 33.6% PAE at 1.42 GHz, while also meeting the LTE 16QAM linearity specs for both error vector magnitude (EVM) and TX emission mask without the need of PA predistortion.

Keywords

3G mobile communication; Long Term Evolution; differential amplifiers; power amplifiers; 3GPP LTE application; 3GPP long term evolution; cascode topology; continuous wave mode; differential PA; differential SiGe power amplifier; envelope tracking technique; envelope-tacking technique; highly efficient SiGe differential power amplifier; highly-efficient polar transmitter system; power-added efficiency; Gain; Linearity; Modulation; Power amplifiers; Power generation; Silicon germanium; Transmitters; Differential Cascode Power Amplifier (PA); SiGe PA; envelope amplifier; envelope-tracking (ET); linearity; power-added efficiency (PAE);

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Bipolar/BiCMOS Circuits and Technology Meeting (BCTM), 2010 IEEE

Conference_Location

Austin, TX

ISSN

1088-9299

Print_ISBN

978-1-4244-8578-9

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/BIPOL.2010.5667924

Filename

5667924