A 2.4-GHz CMOS POWER AMPLIFIER USING A GAIN AND STABILITY ENHANCEMENT TECHNIQUE FOR IEEE 802.11N WLAN APPLICATIONS

Abstract

In this work, we propose a gain and stability enhancement technique with compact size for RF CMOS linear power amplifier applications. The proposed amplifier is designed with differential and cascode structures. To realize a compact size of the power amplifier, the driver stage is merged into the power stage of the power amplifier. To minimize the number of essentially required inductors, the load impedance of the power stage is shared with the driver stage of the power amplifier. Additionally, to moderate stability problems in the power amplifier, the closed loop is removed using a common-gate transistor, which operates in the saturation region. The power amplifier can then operate in the linear operation. To prove the feasibility of the proposed linear amplifier, we designed a 2.4 GHz CMOS power amplifier using the 180-nm RF CMOS process. (C) 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.