Study And Design Of Wireless Transmitter Blocks In 130nm CMOS

Wireless communication systems have been widely used in daily life.Up-converting mixer and RF power amplifier are two basic blocks of the wireless transmitter front-end.The power amplifier is the most power consuming block of the wireless-transmitter which affects the total efficiency of the system.Integrated transmitter blocks can reduce the area,interference and cost.In this thesis,an up-converter mixer and RF power amplifier block are designed for low power transmitters.Besides,a high power high efficiency Class-E power amplifier is designed with bootstrapped cascode structure.All the blocks are designed by Global Foundry 130nm process in this thesis.Power consumption is an important issue in integrated circuit design.The low-power wireless communication project requires a conversion to 3GHz carrier and the output signal should be more than OdBm.For this issue,an active double-balanced structure for the up-converting mixer and a push-pull Class AB structure for the power amplifier are applied to achieve the indicator.As a result the efficiency of the power amplifier is 38.7%,which can save power consumption.As the size of the transistor shrinks,the voltage drop that a transistor can withhold is gradually reduced.That imposes a challenge to the design of high output power amplifiers,especially for switching class E power amplifier.Although it can achieve a very high efficiency,the voltage drop is high which is prone to breakdown or reduce the life cycle of the device.Theoretical calculation shows that the self-bias and bootstrap cascode architecture allow Class E power amplifiers to suffer 44%higher power supply voltage than common cascode architecture.Comparison experiment shows that the bootstrap cascode can achieve higher efficiency through a smaller cascode gate voltage swing.Post simulation result shows that the bootstrap cascode system can operate at 1.6 V supply voltage,output power of 18 dBm,and the efficiency of 43.2%.This architecture can be further extended to other various E/F power amplifier families or be used in more complex architectures such as Envelope Elimination and Recovery power amplifier.The Class AB power amplifier and the Class E power amplifier designed in this thesis complement each other.Class E power amplifier is suitable for high output power,but as switch power amplifier in the 130 nm process,it will cause large switching loss at high frequency.What's more,the efficiency of high-power power amplifiers quickly degrade when the power is backed off,which means not suitable for low-power situation.For different backgrounds,the two power amplifiers in this thesis complement each other,the operating frequencies are high and low,the output power are large and small.Both achieve high efficiency.