Quadrature Switched/Floated Capacitor Power Amplifier with Reconfigurable Self-Coupling Canceling Transformer for Deep Back-Off Efficiency Enhancement

Abstract

This article presents a quadrature switched/floated capacitor power amplifier (SFCPA) with deep back-off efficiency enhancement. The SFCPA is introduced to decrease the dynamic power consumption at power back-off (PBO), which could improve the system efficiency (SE). The reconfigurable self-coupling canceling transformer (RSCCT) with enhanced tuning range of turn ratio is used to achieve impedance boosting for further improved efficiency at deep PBO. Based on the proposed SFCPA, a watt-level quadrature digital power amplifier (DPA) with IQ cell sharing, hybrid Doherty, and impedance boosting is proposed for deep PBO efficiency enhancement. Implemented in 40-nm CMOS, the proposed DPA with 1.2-/2.4-V supply achieves 30.3-dBm saturated output power ( $P_{\mathrm{ out}}$ ) with 36.6%/32.9%/29.1%/23.7%/18.6%/13.2% SE for 0-/3-/6-/9-/12-/15-dB PBOs at 2.4 GHz. For 60-MHz 256-QAM modulation signal, it delivers 23.32-dBm average output power ( $P_{\mathrm{ avg}}$ ) with an error vector magnitude (EVM) of -31.9 dB and an average drain efficiency (DE) of 30.7%. For 40-MHz 1024-QAM signal, it shows 20.44-dBm $P_{\mathrm{ avg}}$ with an EVM of -35.9 dB and an average DE of 22.6%.