Fully monolithic BiCMOS reconfigurable power amplifier for multi-mode and multi-band applications

Abstract

A power amplifier (PA) supporting wideband code division multiple access, long-term evolution (LTE), and wireless local area network applications has been implemented in 0.18-μm SiGe BiCMOS technology. The PA integrates a tunable input matching network, a broadband output matching network, and adaptive bias circuits in a single chip to achieve high linearity and high power in different modulation schemes and operating bands. The three-stage PA adopts a differential-type configuration without using through-silicon-via technology to deliver 4 1.3-42 dB of gain and 28.2-28.6 dBm of 1-dB compression output power with a 20.8-27.6% power-added efficiency (PAE) at 1.85-2.5 GHz. To further validate the usefulness of the proposed PA, the envelope-tracking PA is designed to improve the PAE by 6.5% within the linearity specification of a 24.7-dBm average output power and a-33-dBc adjacent channel leakage ratio for 2.35-GHz 16 quadrature-amplitude-modulation time-division LTE signal with 20-MHz bandwidth.