An 18-GHz, 10.9-dBm fully-integrated power amplifier with 23.5% PAE in 130-nm CMOS

Author

Cao, Changhua ; Xu, Haifeng ; Su, Yu ; O, K.K.

Author_Institution

Dept. of Electr. & Comput. Eng., Florida Univ., Gainesville, FL, USA

fYear

2005

fDate

12-16 Sept. 2005

Firstpage

137

Lastpage

140

Abstract

An 18-GHz fully integrated class-E power amplifier with 10.9-dBm saturated output power, and 23.5-% maximum PAE is fabricated in the UMC 130-nm digital CMOS process. At the saturated output, the required input power level is -5dBm and PA consumes 35mA from V_DD=1.5V. The amplifier is single-ended and includes a 2-stage pre-amplifier and a driver stage. A mode-locking technique exploiting the instability of driver amplifier is used to improve the drive for the gate of output stage. The mode-locking improves PAE by ∼3% and reduces the required input power level by ∼6dB to get same output level.

Keywords

CMOS integrated circuits; driver circuits; integrated circuit testing; microwave integrated circuits; microwave power amplifiers; 1.5 V; 130 nm; 18 GHz; 2-stage pre-amplifier; 35 mA; class-E power amplifier; digital CMOS process; driver amplifier; fully-integrated power amplifier; mode-locking technique; Capacitors; Driver circuits; Feedback circuits; Inductors; Microwave amplifiers; Power amplifiers; Resonant frequency; Silicon; Switches; Voltage;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Solid-State Circuits Conference, 2005. ESSCIRC 2005. Proceedings of the 31st European

Print_ISBN

0-7803-9205-1

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ESSCIR.2005.1541578

Filename

1541578