Research On Silicon Based Integrated Microwave Power Amplifier Circuit

As the amount of information on the Internet continues to grow,the demand for communication speed also increases fast.In order to realize the high-speed wireless communication,people want to get a wide unused spectrum at the Microwave and Millimeter-wave band.Microwave and Millimeter-wave front-ends are important parts in the next generation communication system.The power amplifier is one of the essential modules.With the characteristic size of the silicon-based process,the transistors' characteristic frequency grows fast.They can be used in the Microwave and Millimeterwave band.The silicon-based circuits have the advantage of low cost and high density of integration compared with III-V compound based circuits.However,the silicon-based circuits also have the disadvantage of low supply voltage and worse parasitic effect.It is also an important task to make the silicon-based circuits able to be used in the future Microwave and Millimeter-wave communication system.The main research work of this paper is as follows.1.The research of the wideband high efficiency harmonic controlling power amplifier,which is based on the transformer.Through analyzing the parasitic components of the CMOS transistors and using the feedback element to counteract the parasitic effect of transistors,the transistors' performance and working frequency are improved.The technique of using stacked transistors to improve the output power of CMOS process is analyzed.To overcome the problem of the harmonic controlling circuits,which usually occupy large chip area and generate large insertion loss,a method of harmonic controlling based on the transformer is proposed.The proposed method reduces the insertion loss and increase the working bandwidth.Based the proposed method,a 60 GHz high efficiency power amplifier is designed.The measurement result shows that the maximum PAE reaches 16.3%.The working bandwidth reaches the 13 GHz and the fractional bandwidth reaches 22.6%.2.The research of on-chip Doherty power amplifier based on the voltage combination method.An on-chip Doherty power amplifier,which can be used in the Microwave and Millimeter-wave band without ?/4 transmission line,is proposed by analyzing the difference of the voltage combination and current combination technique.Furthermore,the impact of the imbalance of the voltage combination transformer impedance is analyzed.Then,a balance-compensation voltage combination transformer is proposed based the Marchand Balun.A voltage combination 60 GHz Doherty power amplifier is fabricated and measured.The maximum PAE reaches 16% and the PAE reaches 8.7% at the 6 dB back off point.3.The research of group delay compensation power amplifier,which is used for the FMCW radar.A technique used for compensating the group delay distortion which is based on the all pass filter is proposed.The group delay of a 24 GHz power amplifier for automobile radar based on the technique is less than ±5ps.The distortion can be ignore for the radar.Furthermore,a loop for auto power level control is analyzed.Therefore,the impact of the temperature and process on the radar can be reduced.4.The research of space power combination and phased array system in Microwave and Millimeter-wave band.The built-in-self-test(BIST)circuit for the phased array system is analyzed.A method to reduce the error of the BIST circuit is proposed.Furthermore,the technique for reducing the errors of the phase shifter and attenuator is analyzed.A Ku-band 8 channel transmitter with BIST capability is designed.The equivalent output power is 22 dBm.The measurement results by the high-frequency measurement agrees well with the results from the BIST circuit.The BIST circuit is able to substitute the high frequency measurement.5.The research of dual switching amplifier envelop tracking(ET)modulator.The ET modulator with dual switching amplifiers is difficult to control and has low collaborative efficiency.A method to simplify the controlling of the dual switching amplifier is proposed.The efficiency of converting DC power to envelop signals is improved.An ET modulator for LTE signal based on 180 nm CMOS technology is fabricated.The efficiency reaches 86%.