High-efficiency silicon-based envelope-tracking power amplifier design with envelope shaping for broadband wireless applications

Ruili Wu, Yen Ting Liu, Jerry Lopez, Cliff Schecht, Yan Li, Donald Y.C. Lie

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

71 Scopus citations

Abstract

This paper presents a highly efficient silicon-based envelope-tracking power amplifier (ET-PA) for broadband wireless applications. A pseudo-differential power amplifier (PA) is designed using two integrated SiGe power cells fabricated in a 0.35-μm SiGe BiCMOS technology with through-silicon-via (TSV). In the continuous-wave (CW) measurement, the PA achieves a saturated output power (Pout) of around 2 W with power-added efficiency (PAE) above 65% across the bandwidth of 0.7-1.0 GHz. To optimize the ET-PA system performance, several envelope shaping methods such as dc shifting, envelope scaling, envelope clipping, and envelope attenuation at back-off have been investigated carefully. A highly efficient monolithic CMOS envelope modulator (EM) integrated circuit (IC) is designed in a 0.35- m bipolar-CMOS-DMOS (BCD) process to mate with our SiGe PA. With the LTE 16 QAM 5/10/20-MHz input signals, our ET-PA system achieves around 28 dBm linear (Pout), passing the stringent LTE linearity specs such as the spectrum emission mask with an average composite system PAE of 42.3%/41.1%/40.2%, respectively. No predistortion is applied in this work.

Original languageEnglish
Article number6542009
Pages (from-to)2030-2040
Number of pages11
JournalIEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits
Volume48
Issue number9
DOIs
StatePublished - 2013

Keywords

  • Envelope modulator (EM)
  • Envelope shaping method
  • Envelope-tracking (ET)
  • Long-term evolution (LTE)
  • SiGe power amplifier (SiGe PA)
  • Through-silicon-via (TSV)

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