An Excellent Gain Flatness 3.0–7.0 GHz CMOS PA for UWB Applications

This letter presents an excellent gain flatness CMOS power amplifier (PA) for UWB applications at 3.0-7.0 GHz in TSMC 0.18 μm CMOS technology. The UWB PA proposed here employs a current-reused technique to enhance the gain at the upper end of the desired band, a shunt and a series peaking inductors with a resistive feedback at the second stage to obtain the wider and flat gain, while shunt-shunt feedback helps to enhance the bandwidth and improve the output wideband matching. The measurement results indicated that the input return loss (S11) less than -6 dB, output return loss (S22) less than -7 dB, and excellent gain flatness approximately 14.5 ±0.5 dB over the frequency range of interest. The output 1 dB compression of 7 dBm, the output third-order intercept point (OIP3) of 18 dBm, and a phase linearity property (group delay) of ±178.5 ps across the whole band were obtained with a power consumption of 24 mW.

[1]  Ruey-Lue Wang,et al.  3~5 GHz Cascoded UWB Power Amplifier , 2006, APCCAS 2006 - 2006 IEEE Asia Pacific Conference on Circuits and Systems.

[2]  Fabian Kung,et al.  High efficiency CMOS power amplifier for 3 to 5 GHz ultra-wideband (UWB) application , 2009, IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics.

[3]  A. Pham,et al.  A CMOS power amplifier for full-band UWB transmitters , 2006, IEEE Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits (RFIC) Symposium, 2006.

[4]  Chao Lu,et al.  Linearization of CMOS Broadband Power Amplifiers Through Combined Multigated Transistors and Capacitance Compensation , 2007, IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques.

[5]  Wen-Chieh Wang,et al.  The design of integrated 3-GHz to 11-GHz CMOS transmitter for full-band ultra-wideband (UWB) applications , 2008, 2008 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems.

[6]  Jun-De Jin,et al.  A 3.1–10.6 GHz Ultra-Wideband CMOS Low Noise Amplifier With Current-Reused Technique , 2007, IEEE Microwave and Wireless Components Letters.

[7]  Yo-Sheng Lin,et al.  A high-performance wideband CMOS low-noise amplifier using inductive series and parallel peaking techniques , 2008 .

[8]  Hossein Hashemi,et al.  A 0.13µm CMOS power amplifier with ultra-wide instantaneous bandwidth for imaging applications , 2009, 2009 IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference - Digest of Technical Papers.

[9]  Yo-Sheng Lin,et al.  An Excellent Phase-Linearity 3.1-10.6 GHz CMOS UWB LNA Using Standard 0.18 μm CMOS Technology , 2007, 2007 Asia-Pacific Microwave Conference.

[10]  H. Chuang,et al.  A 6-10-GHz CMOS Power Amplifier with an Inter-stage Wideband Impedance Transformer For UWB Transmitters , 2008, 2008 38th European Microwave Conference.