A 2.4-GHz 24-dBm SOI CMOS power amplifier with on-chip tunable matching network for enhanced efficiency in back-off

Author

Carrara, Francesco ; Presti, Calogero D. ; Palmisano, Giuseppe

Author_Institution

Fac. di Ing., Univ. di Catania, Catania, Italy

fYear

2009

fDate

14-18 Sept. 2009

Firstpage

176

Lastpage

179

Abstract

In this work, the potential of load adaptation for enhanced back-off efficiency in RF power amplifiers (PAs) is investigated through a 0.13-mum silicon-on-insulator (SOI) CMOS fabrication technology. To this aim, the first CMOS PA with fully integrated reconfigurable output matching network is presented. The PA delivers a 24-dBm maximum output power while operating at 2.4 GHz and 2-V supply voltage. A significant efficiency improvement of up to 34% is achieved through load adaptation, peak efficiency being as high as 65%. Linear operation is also demonstrated under two-tone excitation, since a 16-dBm output power is attained while complying with a -40-dBc IM3 specification.

Keywords

CMOS analogue integrated circuits; MMIC power amplifiers; UHF power amplifiers; impedance matching; radiocommunication; silicon-on-insulator; RF power amplifier; SOI CMOS power amplifier; enhanced back off efficiency; frequency 2.4 GHz; load adaptation; on chip tunable matching network; reconfigurable output matching network; silicon-on-insulator CMOS fabrication; size 0.13 mum; voltage 2 V; CMOS technology; Fabrication; Impedance matching; Network-on-a-chip; Power amplifiers; Power generation; Radio frequency; Radiofrequency amplifiers; Silicon on insulator technology; Voltage;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

ESSCIRC, 2009. ESSCIRC '09. Proceedings of

Conference_Location

Athens

ISSN

1930-8833

Print_ISBN

978-1-4244-4354-3

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ESSCIRC.2009.5325995

Filename

5325995