A 28 nm standard CMOS watt-level power amplifier for LTE applications

In this paper, a 28nm radio frequency (RF) complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) power amplifier (PA) is presented. It was designed to meet 3GPP TS 36.101 V10.10.0 requirements for Long Term Evolution (LTE). The design was tested on board and has full onchip matching. Furthermore, the biasing for class-AB is also implemented on chip. The maximum gain is more than 15 dB until 0dBm input power. It achieves a power added efficiency (PAE) of 35.2 %, a drain efficiency (DE) of 39.5% and a maximum output power Pmax of 31.7dBm at a frequency of 1.83 GHz. The adjacent channel leakage power ratio (ACLR) for the evolved universal terrestrial radio access (E-UTRA) measured for full allocated LTE15 PUSCH are for the lower band 33.2 dBc and for the upper band 33.2 dBc. The UTRAACLR for the lower and upper band is 36.2 dBc and 35.1 dBc, respectively. The Error Vector Magnitude (EVM) is 4.8% for a quadrature phase-shift keying (QPSK) and 3.8% for a 16 quadrature amplitude modulation (16QAM) signal.