A wideband multi-stage inverter-based driver amplifier for IEEE 802.22 WRAN transmitters

This paper proposes a wideband multi-stage inverter-based driver amplifier (DA) suitable for IEEE 802.22 wireless regional area network (WRAN) transmitters. In order to optimize the voltage gain, power, linearity and load drivability, the DA employs two cascaded inverters followed by a source follower, in which the second inverter employs resistive feedback and an inverter-based active load to achieve linearization. Simulated in 65 nm CMOS, the achieved voltage gain is 17.6 dB and the power is 14.6 mW at 1.2 V. The -3 dB bandwidth is 5.6 MHz to 2.17 GHz. For a 3^rd-order intermodulation distortion (IMD3) of -45 dBc, the output power reaches -7.3 dBm.