A 3.3V, 24dBm CHT Integrated CMOS 180nm Power Amplifier for NB-IoT Application

Abstract

In this project, a 180 nm capacitive harmonic termination (CHT) CMOS-based power amplifier (PA) is designed for the Narrow-Band Internet of Things (NB-IoT) application. The PA's aimed operating frequency is between 1.9 GHz and 2.1 GHz. At schematic level simulation, the PA provides a power gain of 14 dB and a compressed output power of 24 dBm. With a resulting peak OIP3 of 33 dBm, the average power added efficiency (PAE) achieved is 40 %. The CMOS PA operates with a biasing gate voltage of 1.2 V under the voltage headroom of 3.3 V. The CHT CMOS PA provides good efficiency with negligible trade-off between linearity and output power.