New Design Opportunities exploiting FDSOI technology for RF Power Amplifier and LNA design

To demonstrate the capacity of Fully-Depleted Silicon-On-Insulator (FDSOI) technology, this paper presents two radio frequency designs taking benefit of the key advantages of the FDSOI. Specific process opportunities and body biasing are used to simultaneously reduce silicon area and improve radio frequency performance. First, a WiFi Power Amplifier (PA) fabricated in 28nm UTBB FDSOI process with 1.8v thick oxide MOS is presented. This PA exhibits a 23dBm Psat output power and l8dBm, 8% PAE under low distortion with a 3.7v power supply. This makes this PA suitable for 802.11ac WiFi standard requirements. Then an Ultra Low Power (ULP) inductorless Low Noise Amplifier (LNA) is presented using the same 28nm UTBB FDSOI technology. Based on a boosted common gate architecture, this LNA has been implemented reaching 16dB of voltage gain (G
_v
), 7.3dB Noise Figure (NF) for a total power consumption of only 300μW under 0.6v power supply. This structure points out the potential of back biasing to reduce the power consumption of more than 30% compared to classical CMOS design with similar RF performances.