A single-chip highly linear 2.4GHz 30dBm power amplifier in 90nm CMOS

In recent years, there has been tremendous interest in trying to implement power amplifiers (PAs) in CMOS, due to cost and integration benefits. However, the low supply voltage, conductive substrate, and high loss of on-chip passives make monolithic, linear, high-power PA design challenging in CMOS. Most of the high-power CMOS PAs reported to date are switching-type [1,2], and have not exhibited sufficient linearity required for modern wireless standards. In this paper, a single-chip linear CMOS PA with sufficient power and linearity for emerging OFDM-based applications is reported. This 90nm fully-integrated PA adopts a differential topology and operates at 3.3V supply.

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