A single-chip CMOS linear power amplifier for ISM-band application

A low-voltage CMOS linear power amplifier (PA) is presented for 2.4 GHz ISM-band short range wireless communication in this paper. All the inductors in the circuit are bonding-wire inductors and the capacitors are MIM capacitors. A novel adaptive biasing is used at the output stage, which dramatically increases the linear output power range as well as decreases the power dissipation at lower output power level. Grounding strategy is also considered to make the PA stable in all process corners. The PA is a two-stage configuration and is implemented in 0.35 mum 3.3 V CMOS process. The spectreRF simulation results show that the PA can deliver +25.2 dBm of linear output power with a power gain of higher than 29 dB in -4 dBm input power range.