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Review
. 2023 Aug 1;14(8):1551.
doi: 10.3390/mi14081551.

A State-of-the-Art Review on CMOS Radio Frequency Power Amplifiers for Wireless Communication Systems

Sofiyah Sal Hamid  1 , Selvakumar Mariappan  1 , Jagadheswaran Rajendran  1 , Arvind Singh Rawat  2 , Nuha A Rhaffor  1 , Narendra Kumar  3 , Arokia Nathan  4 , Binboga S Yarman  5
Affiliations
Review

A State-of-the-Art Review on CMOS Radio Frequency Power Amplifiers for Wireless Communication Systems

Sofiyah Sal Hamid et al. Micromachines (Basel). .

Abstract

Wireless communication systems have undergone significant development in recent years, particularly with the transition from fourth generation (4G) to fifth generation (5G). As the number of wireless devices and mobile data usage increase, there is a growing need for enhancements and upgrades to the current wireless communication systems. CMOS transceivers are increasingly being explored to meet the requirements of the latest wireless communication protocols and applications while achieving the goal of system-on-chip (SoC). The radio frequency power amplifier (RFPA) in a CMOS transmitter plays a crucial role in amplifying RF signals and transmitting them from the antenna. This state-of-the-art review paper presents a concise discussion of the performance metrics that are important for designing a CMOS PA, followed by an overview of the trending research on CMOS PA techniques that focuses on efficiency, linearity, and bandwidth enhancement.

Keywords: CMOS; bandwidth; efficiency; linearity; power amplifier; radio frequency; wireless communication.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Mobile subscription trend [1].
Figure 2
Figure 2
Depiction of an output power definition in a PA.
Figure 3
Figure 3
The IMD components induced by a PA.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Spectral regrowth of a PA under a modulated signal.
Figure 5
Figure 5
EVM constellation diagram.
Figure 6
Figure 6
AM–AM feature of a PA across the output power.
Figure 7
Figure 7
AM–PM feature of a PA across the output power.
Figure 8
Figure 8
(a) Series transformer combination structure. (b) Parallel transformer combination structure.
Figure 9
Figure 9
Block diagram of a classic DPA.
Figure 10
Figure 10
The concept of Doherty PA.
Figure 11
Figure 11
The efficiency profile of DPA.
Figure 12
Figure 12
Voltage difference between supply voltage and modulated RF output signal waveform.
Figure 13
Figure 13
Block diagram of the ETPA.
Figure 14
Figure 14
Key waveforms in an ETPA.
Figure 15
Figure 15
Key waveforms in an EERPA.
Figure 16
Figure 16
Architecture block diagram of out-phasing.
Figure 17
Figure 17
Operation principle of out-phasing.
Figure 18
Figure 18
PAE across output power for the proposed efficiency enhancement techniques [55,58,60,61,62,63,64,65,66,67,72,73,74,77,78,79,80,85,86,87,89,90,91,92,99,100,101,102,103,104].
Figure 19
Figure 19
Principle of feedback technique.
Figure 20
Figure 20
Cartesian feedback technique.
Figure 21
Figure 21
Block diagram of a polar feedback system.
Figure 22
Figure 22
Block diagram of the feed-forward-based PA.
Figure 23
Figure 23
Block diagram of LINC technique.
Figure 24
Figure 24
The concept of pre-distortion.
Figure 25
Figure 25
Linear PAE across linear output power for the proposed linearity enhancement techniques [116,118,119,121,123,124,129,132,133,134,135,136,137,142,143,144,145,146,147,148,149,150].
Figure 26
Figure 26
Simplified n-section DA.
Figure 27
Figure 27
Frequency response comparison.
Figure 28
Figure 28
Cascode PA configuration.
Figure 29
Figure 29
Configuration of a resistive feedback.
Figure 30
Figure 30
(a) Small signal model of CS; (b) small signal model of CS with feedback.
Figure 31
Figure 31
Schematic of the basic switched capacitor (SC) architecture.
Figure 32
Figure 32
Frequency bandwidth achieved by the proposed bandwidth enhancement techniques [154,155,156,157,161,162,163,164,165,167,168,169,181,182,183,184,189,190].
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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