Study on CMOS class-E power amplifiers for LTE applications

Integrating power amplifiers (PAs) is one of the challenges for system-on-chip (SOC) applications due to the low breakdown voltage of nanoscale CMOS devices. This paper presents the study and design of three class-E PAs based on lumped element load transformation networks (LTNs) in 90nm CMOS process for LTE band, i.e. 2.55 GHz. The simulation results show that the designed PAs can deliver an output power (P
_out
) of more than 20.1dBm and power added efficiency (PAE) greater than 43.6% when operated from 2.5V supply. The results are analysed and evaluated to compare the performance of the implemented class-E PAs in terms of PAE, power gain (G) and harmonic rejection for LTE applications.