A Highly Efficient CMOS Envelope Tracking Power Amplifier Using All Bias Node Controls

Abstract

This letter presents a highly efficient CMOS power amplifier (PA) with adaptive envelope-tracking (ET) techniques. The linearity and efficiency of the PA are improved by ET-based techniques at the gate of the common-gate (CG), the gate of the common-source (CS), and the drain of the CG. The proposed CMOS ET PA is fabricated using a 0.18 $\mu{\rm m}$ CMOS technology with a printed circuit board (PCB) transformer which has a lower insertion loss than CMOS one. Without any help of additional resources, the CMOS PA delivers an average output power of 27.5 dBm with a power-added efficiency (PAE) of 42.5%, an error vector magnitude (EVM) of 2.5%, and an ${\rm ACLR}_{E-UTRA}$ of $-$ 36.5 dBc at 1.85 GHz for a long term evolution (LTE) signal with a bandwidth of 10 MHz and 7.5 dB peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR).