Low-Power CMOS Power Amplifier for 3.1–10.6 GHz Ultra-Wideband Transmitter

ABSTRACT

This paper proposes the design of a low-power ultra-wideband (UWB) power amplifier (PA) in 0.18 µm complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology. With the common-gate configuration employed as the input stage, the broad-band input matching is obtained. The UWB PA employs a forward body biasing technique to reduce power consumption. Meanwhile, in driver stage and power stage of this PA, the resistive feed-back technique with an inter-stage inductor and a series peaking inductors is used to achieve the wider and gain flatness. The post-layout simulation results indicated that the input return loss (S₁₁) was less than −15.8 dB, output return loss (S₂₂) was less than −8.3 dB, and average power gain of 10.6 dB with a flatness about 1.0 dB. The output 1 dB compression point was about 3 dBm. Moreover, a very low power consumption of 14.3 mW was achieved with a die area of 0.96 × 0.95 mm².

KEYWORDS:

• common-gate (CG)
• forward body bias
• low power
• Power amplifier (PA)
• ultra-wideband (UWB)

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the Open Fund Project of Key Laboratory (No. 13K014), Young Teachers Program in Hunan Universities and The Science and Technology Planning Project of Hunan Province (No. 2013WK3019) for financially supporting this research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sichun Du

Sichun Du received the ME degree in computer application technology from Hunan University, Changsha, China. His current research interests include CMOS RFIC and UWB technology.

E-mail: [email protected]

Xionghui Zhu

Xionghui Zhu received the BS degree in 2013. Now he is studying towards the MS degree at the Hunan University. His research includes design and simulation of RF CMOS integrated circuits.

E-mail: [email protected]

Hongxia Yin

Hongxia Yin received the ME degree in computer application technology from Zhongnan University, Changsha, China. Her current research interests include CMOS RFIC and network coding technology.

E-mail: [email protected]

Wenbin Huang

Wenbin Huang received the BS degree in 2011 and received the MS degree at the Hunan University. His research includes design and simulation of RF CMOS integrated circuits.

E-mail: [email protected]