A highly-efficient RF polar transmitter using SiGe power amplifier and CMOS envelope-tracking amplifier for mobile WiMAX

Author

Li, Yan ; Wu, Po-Hsing ; Lopez, Jerry ; Wu, Ruili ; Lie, Donald Y C ; Chen, Kevin ; Wu, Stanley ; Yang, Tzu-Yi

Author_Institution

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

fYear

2011

fDate

25-28 April 2011

Firstpage

1

Lastpage

4

Abstract

This paper presents a large-signal envelope-tracking (ET) polar transmitter (TX) system with a monolithic cascode SiGe power amplifier (PA) for mobile WiMAX applications. The envelope amplifiers are designed in the TSMC 0.35μm SiGe BiCMOS technology and also with discrete components for comparisons. The entire polar TX system using the discrete envelope amplifier in measurement achieves the power-added efficiency (PAE) of 30% at the average output power of 18 dBm with the EVM of 5% for WiMAX 64QAM 10 MHz signal. The RF/analog/digital co-simulations of the entire polar TX system with the integrated CMOS envelope amplifier show similar linearity and efficiency performances when compared with the measurement results. Both the simulation and measurement data suggests our polar TX design achieves the highest PAE among the state-of-the-art Si-based OFDM polar TX systems reported in the literature.

Keywords

CMOS integrated circuits; WiMax; mobile radio; radio transmitters; BiCMOS technology; CMOS envelope tracking amplifier; SiGe; TSMC; discrete components; discrete envelope amplifier; highly efficient RF polar transmitter; large-signal envelope-tracking polar transmitter; mobile WiMAX; monolithic cascode; power added efficiency; power amplifier; wavelength 0.35 mum; BiCMOS integrated circuits; CMOS integrated circuits; Power amplifiers; Power generation; Radio frequency; Silicon germanium; WiMAX;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

VLSI Design, Automation and Test (VLSI-DAT), 2011 International Symposium on

Conference_Location

Hsinchu

ISSN

Pending

Print_ISBN

978-1-4244-8500-0

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/VDAT.2011.5783610

Filename

5783610