Fully Integrated Wideband Doherty PA with Additive-Voltage Supported Load-Modulation in CMOS 130nm

This work introduces the first CMOS integrated Doherty power amplifier (DPA) with additive-voltage supported continuous load-modulation. Key features of the architecture are the wideband behaviour and low AM-PM distortion. Owing to the transformer based architecture, it is area efficient and highly suitable for integrated technologies. A prototype has been implemented in CMOS 130 nm. The complete chip size including input matching and the proposed load modulation network is less than 1.2mm². Measured peak output power of 25 dBm is reached at 2.4 GHz with 27.6% power added efficiency (PAE) and 24% PAE at 6 dB backoff. The DPA delivers more than 24 dBm output power from 2.2 GHz to 3 GHz and thus, covers 31% of bandwidth. Measured AM-PM distortion of less than 3° is obtained.