Fully integrated LTE-band CMOS tunable power amplifier

This paper presents a novel design of a tunable multimode multiband power amplifier (PA) integrated in 130nm CMOS technology. For covering the Long-Term Evolution (LTE) bands, this power amplifier utilizes a novel technique of band switching to tune the center frequency of the band in use. The designed power amplifier covers up to 25 specified frequency bands of LTE mobile network ranging from 700MHz to 950MHz (lower band), and 1450MHz to 2050MHz (higher band). Moreover, the proposed tunable PA enables triple power levels; low, medium and high power modes for each of the lower and higher bands. At the lower band, this tunable PA obtains saturated output power (Psat) of 16.1dBm/19.8dBm/24.0dBm, and at the higher band, it can deliver 21.9dBm/23.2dBm/26.2dbm as low/mid/high power modes, respectively.