| This research focuses on radio frequency (RF) power amplifier circuit design for Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) 802.11a applications. Since the IEEE WLAN 802.11a, b, and g standards were announced, WLAN system architectures have been developed for each specific wireless standard. With the huge demand of WLAN transceiver chipsets, it is preferable to design them at a low cost and highly integrated with the goal of a single chip solution. To achieve this goal, CMOS process technology is used in the power amplifier design.; In this dissertation, a series of design procedures of RF CMOS power amplifier are described. Power amplifiers are the last output stage in transmitter architecture and widely used in various wireless transceiver applications. A fully integrated differential CMOS power amplifier is designed with 0.18mum IBM BiCMOS SiGe process for 5GHz WLAN transceiver applications.; Power amplifier schematic, layout, simulation results, and measurement results are shown. Various CMOS power amplifier simulations and measurements are performed such as single tone, two-tone, s-parameter, load-pull, EVM, and Monte Carlo tests. The revision of the 5GHz WLAN power amplifier was optimized by extracting parasitic resistances, capacitances, and inductances for accurate modeling on the metal line of the RF signal path. The simulation and measurement performances are compared to those of other commercial power amplifiers. An automating WLAN power amplifier distortion test was developed and used to obtain efficient and accurate measurement results.; With an introduction of the load-pull technique, a conventional single-ended load-pull system is presented. A new differential load-pull system is developed to characterize the differential power amplifier utilizing two existing single-ended tuners. To calculate mathematical transformation for differential-mode and common-mode test, the mixed-mode s-parameter technique for large-signal characterization is described. A block diagram of the differential load-pull is presented and simulated. Also, the equipment required for the differential load-pull system is described. |
