A fully integrated, highly linear SiGe BiCMOS class-AB power amplifier targeting 2.4GHz applications

This paper presents a 2.4 GHz fully integrated power amplifier based on 0.18 μm SiGe BiCMOS technology for wireless local area network applications. The power amplifier shows a 1 dB compression output power of 22.19 dBm at an input power of 0.135 dBm. A temperature-insensitive bias circuit is used in this PA design to improve the amplifier linearity. The total fabricated die size is about 1.5 mm × 1.2 mm. The designed PA based on SiGe BiCMOS technology demonstrates a competitive linearity performance compared with GaAs, when considering the factors of cost and process complexity.