Fully Integrated Wideband Doherty PA with Additive-Voltage Supported Load-Modulation in CMOS 130nm

This work introduces the first CMOS integrated Doherty power amplifier (DPA) with additive-voltage supported continuous load-modulation. Key features of the architecture are the wideband behaviour and low AM-PM distortion. Owing to the transformer based architecture, it is area efficient and highly suitable for integrated technologies. A prototype has been implemented in CMOS 130 nm. The complete chip size including input matching and the proposed load modulation network is less than 1.2 mm2. Measured peak output power of 25 dBm is reached at 2.4 GHz with 27.6 % power added efficiency (PAE) and 24 % PAE at 6 dB backoff. The DPA delivers more than 24 dBm output power from 2.2 GHz to 3 GHz and thus, covers 31 % of bandwidth. Measured AM-PM distortion of less than 3◦ is obtained.

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