An Inductorless 300 MHz Wideband CMOS Power Amplifier

Abstract

The power amplifier tends to be one of the most demanding parts to fully integrate when building an entire radio on a CMOS chip. In this paper the design of a fully integrated RF power amplifier without inductors is described. As inductors in CMOS technology are associated with various problems, it is interesting to examine what performance can be achieved without them. An amplifier with an operating band from 60 MHz to 300 MHz (−3 dB) is built in 0.8 μm CMOS. A 3 V supply is used. The measured midband power gain is 30 dB with 50 Ω resistive source and load impedance. As linearity is important for many modern modulation schemes, the amplifier is designed to be as linear as possible. The measured third order intercept point is 23 dBm and the 1 dB compression point is 10 dBm, both referred to the output. The output is single ended to avoid an off-chip differential to single ended transformer.