CMOS Linear Power Amplifier with Envelope Tracking Operation (Invited Paper)

Abstract

A differential-cascode CMOS power amplifier (PA) with a supply modulator for envelope tracking (ET) has been implemented by 0.18 μm RF CMOS technology. The loss at the output is minimized by implementing the output transformer on a FR-4 printed circuit board (PCB). The CMOS PA utilizes the 2 nd harmonic short at the input to enhance the linearity. The measurement was done by the 10MHz bandwidth 16QAM 6.88 dB peak-to-average power ratio long-term evolution (LTE) signal at 1.85 GHz. The ET operation of the CMOS PA with the supply modulator enhances the power-added efficiency (PAE) by 2.5, to 10% over the stand-alone CMOS PA for the LTE signal. The ET PA achieves a PAE of 36.5% and an ACLRE-UTRA of ?32.7 dBc at an average output power of 27 dBm.