A High-Gain Continuous Class- F Power Amplifier in 90-nm CMOS for 5G Communication

Abstract

A continuous class-F power amplifier (PA) is proposed using 90-nm CMOS process. The efficiency of the two-stage PA is enhanced by the proposed continuous class-F output matching network, which controls the reactive movement of the fundamental and 2nd harmonic impedances to achieve impedance condition of continuous class F. Besides, the gate bias of driver stage is designed for the reverse AM-PM distortion to compensate the of AM-PM distortion of the power stage. The PA achieves a measured small-signal gain of 26 dB, saturation output power (P sat ) of 15.5 dBm, peak power-added efficiency (PAE) of 32%, output I-dB compression power (OP 1dB ) of 13.7 dBm at 27 GHz, respectively. The digital-modulation measurement for 64-QAM signal with bandwidth of 250 MHz achieves average output power (P o,avg ) 9.5 dBm when the EVM is −25 dB.