Power amplifiers on thin-film-silicon-on-insulator (TFSOI) technology

Portable wireless communication applications have provided a relentless driving force for semiconductor manufacturers to deliver high performance circuits operating with drastically reduced supply voltage and power. To ultimately enable a single chip solution, process technology for these circuits must support all functions within the radio, from digital microcontrollers to RF downconversion. The literature reflects previous work that soundly demonstrates the advantages of thin-film-silicon-on-insulator (TFSOI) in low power digital baseband circuits such as microcontroller CPUs, SRAM, DRAM and ALUs (Huang et al. 1997). More recently, results of receiver functions such as low noise amplifiers, mixers, and VCOs implemented in TFSOI have been reported (Harada et al. 1997; Dekker et al. 1997; Tseng et al. 1998). Lack of a successful demonstration of a power amplifier has been one element preventing implementation of a complete TFSOI RF transceiver. This paper reports the results of the first demonstration of power amplifiers on TFSOI, using n-channel RF MOSFET devices.