A load-shared CMOS power amplifier with efficiency boosting at low power mode for polar transmitters

Abstract

A load-shared CMOS power amplifier (PA) for 1.8-GHz polar transmitter applications has been implemented in standard 0.18-mu m CMOS technology and fully characterized to demonstrate its efficiency boosting technique in low power mode. With the aid of cascode amplifiers, the load-shared configuration achieves efficiency improvement at low supply voltage in a polar transmitter. A differential class-E amplifier with a parallel resonant circuit is analyzed and incorporated in the load-shared PA. The load-shared configuration is composed of driver amplifiers (DAs) and PAs whose output loads are shared. The DA has a constant gate voltage biasing of a cascode amplifier for efficiency boosting, whereas the PA has a self-biased cascode configuration to be turned on and off by a supply voltage. The measurement results of the load-shared configuration show a drain efficiency increase from 6 % to 30 % at 16-dBm output power compared with a conventional self-biased cascode amplifier. The load-shared PA is reported with 35.6% of power-added efficiency and 32.2 dBm of output power at 1.88 GHz.