Reconfigurable RF Power Amplifiers on Silicon for Wireless Handsets

Reconfigurable RF Power Amplifiers on Silicon for Wireless Handsets is intended to designers and researchers who have to tackle the efficiency/linearity trade-off in modern RF transmitters so as to extend their battery lifetime. High data rate 3G/4G standards feature broad channel bandwidths, high dynamic range and critical envelope variations which generally forces the power amplifier (PA) to operate in a low efficiency “backed-off” regime. Classic efficiency enhancement techniques such as Envelope Elimination and Restoration reveal to be little compliant with handset-dedicated PA implementation due to their channel-bandwidth-limited behavior and their increased die area consumption and/or bill-of-material. The architectural advances that are proposed in this book circumvent these issues since they put the stress on low die-area /low power-consumption control circuitry. The advantages of silicon over III/V technologies are highlighted by several analogue signal processing techniques that can be implemented on-chip with a power amplifier. System-level and transistor-level simulations are combined to illustrate the principles of the proposed power adaptive solutions. Measurement on BICMOS demonstrators allows validating the functionality of dynamic linearity/efficiency management. In Reconfigurable RF Power Amplifiers on Silicon for Wireless Handsets, PA designers will find a review of technologies, architectures and theoretical formalisms (Volterra series…) that are traditionally related to PA design. Specific issues that one encounters in power amplifiers (such as thermal / memory effects, stability, VSWR sensitivity…) and the way of overcoming them are also extensively considered throughout this book.

Laurent Leyssenne received the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from University of Bordeaux, France in 2009. His main field of research is the design of RF power amplifiers.

Eric Kerhervé received the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from University of Bordeaux, France in 1994. He joined ENSEIRB and the IMS Laboratory in 1996, where he is currently a Professor in Microelectronics and Microwave applications. He has authored or co-authored more than 190 technical papers, and was awarded 17 patents.

Yann Deval received the Ph.D. degree from the University of Bordeaux, France, in 1994. He joined the University of Bordeaux in 1994 as an Assistant Professor, and became a Full Professor at ENSEIRB, in 2004. From 1994 to 2006, he pursued his research in the domain of analog and radiofrequency integrated circuits at IMS Microelectronics laboratory. Since 2007, he is in charge of the IC Design Group at IMS. He has published more than 90 papers in international journals and conference proceedings.