A Fully-Integrated Band-Switchable CMOS Power Amplifier for Wireless Applications

This work, for the first time, proposes a fully integrated band-switchable RF power amplifier (PA) by using a novel approach towards switching the matching networks. In this approach, two matching networks which can be controlled by digital bits will provide the lower and higher operating frequency bands for the PA. In order to implement the proposed band-switchable PA, a robust RF switch is presented by using resistive body floating technique and 6-terminal triple-well NMOS. The measured results show that the proposed band-switchable power amplifier can operate at 980MHz and 1900MHz as the lower and the higher frequency bands, and delivers saturated output power (Psat) of 21. 3dBm/23.0dBm, output 1-dB compression point (PldB) of 19. 5dBm/21.0dBm, and 3-dB bandwidth of 400MHz/550MHz, respectively, showing promising advancement compared to the state-of-the-art. The proposed power amplifier is designed and implemented in 180nm CMOS process with die area of 3.1mm× 1.6mm.