An Ultra-Wideband Digitally Programmable Power Amplifier with Efficiency Enhancement for Cellular and Emerging Wireless Communication Standards

The design and measurements of a fabricated novel digitally programmable wideband power amplifier (PA) are presented. The PA is made suitable for use in all communication standards, including GSM, 3G, LTE and Femto-cells, offering a bandwidth of several octaves covering presently 300 MHz to 3.5 GHz. It meets power, efficiency and linearity specifications. The amplifier showed excellent performances. The uniquely linear and high power SONY GaAs J-PHEMT process along with novel output-stage multiple cascode topology structure are discussed. This enabled a distinctive larger output impedance and power and low voltage operation. The output stage offered 15–20 dB of gain without a driver. The circuit requires only little output or input matching for gain or impedance, depending on the application. In order to obtain higher gain and optimal application specific performance, a driver stage was added on the same die. A digitally programmable tuning chip was incorporated to the solution to optimize the performance for large bandwidths exceeding 40%. For smaller bandwidths no digital tuning was required. Digital pre-distortion algorithm was tested for better linearization. To the best knowledge of the authors, this is the first comprehensive plug-and-play solution for multi-band and multi-mode handset transmitters with the single chip one PA.