A SiGe Envelope-Tracking Power Amplifier With an Integrated CMOS Envelope Modulator for Mobile WiMAX/3GPP LTE Transmitters

This paper presents a SiGe envelope-tracking (ET) cascode power amplifier (PA) with an integrated CMOS envelope modulator for mobile WiMAX and 3GPP long-term evolution (LTE) transmitters (TXs). The entire ET-based RF PA system delivers the linear output power of 22.3/24.3 dBm with the overall power-added efficiency of 33%/42% at 2.4 GHz for the WiMAX 64 quadrature amplitude modulation (64QAM) and the 3GPP LTE 16 quadrature amplitude modulation, respectively. Additionally, it exhibits a highly efficient broadband characteristic for multiband applications. Compared to the conventional fixed-supply cascode PA, our ET-based cascode PA meets the WiMAX/LTE spectral mask and error vector magnitude spec at close to itsP1dBcompression without the need of predistortion. The SiGe PA and the CMOS envelope modulator are both designed and fabricated in the TSMC 0.35-μm SiGe BiCMOS process on the same die. This study represents an essential integration step toward achieving a fully monolithic large-signal ET-based TX for wideband wireless applications.