A fully monolithically integrated 4.6 GHz DC-DC converter

This paper presents the design and measurement of a proof-of-concept fully monolithically integrated DC-DC converter operating at 4.6 GHz. The converter is designed in Qorvo's 0.15 μm GaN on SiC process and has a total area of 2.5mm × 3.8 mm. The distributed class-E² converter does not use any external inductors or other lumped elements. The maximum efficiency achieved by the converter is 48% at 0.6W output power. The converter can also operate in self-synchronous mode without rectifier gate drive, albeit with a drop in performance.