This thesis presents the research on the key components for the fifth generation (5G) communication systems which includes a power amplifier and an up-conversion mixer. The first work is a wideband and efficient power amplifier in 65-nm CMOS technology. The other work is a high linearity mixer fabricated in 28-nm CMOS technology and studies the linearity of the mixer.
At first, the 30 – 40 GHz continuous class-F-1 power amplifier is presented in chapter 2. To meet the demands for high speed wireless data transmission, wide bandwidth and high efficiency are important for the design of power amplifier. The proposed PA is worked at continuous class-F-1 mode to accomplish high efficiency during the desired bandwidth. Besides, the linearity of the power amplifier is improved thanks to the harmonic output matching and the reason is also introduced in this chapter.
The cause of linearity improvement by the bias selection of the transistors is discussed.
The proposed PA reaches a saturated output power (Psat) of 17.9 dBm and output power bandwidth (30 to 40 GHz) with 33 % peak PAE. When tested with a single-carrier 64-QAM signal, this PA achieves bandwidth of 400 MHz, 14.1-dBm average output power, and 22.1% average PAE under root-mean-square (rms) error vector magnitude (EVM) -25.1 dB.
The other work is a 28 GHz high linearity up-conversion mixer in 28 nm CMOS technology presented in chapter 3. To transmit higher-order modulation signal, the SNR of wireless transceiver has to be high enough to lower bit-error-rate (BER). In the large power region, the third-harmonic signal is the main interference on the SNR of the whole system, Therefore, IM2 signal injection technique is introduced to the transconductance stage of the mixer for IM3 cancellation. Besides, the AM-AM,
AM-PM, and IM3 distortion of mixer core and transconductance stage are also discussed.
The two-tone measurement results reveal that the IM3 distortion is cancelled in the wide IF power region. The proposed mixer achieves 7.3 dBm output third-order intercept point. Moreover, this mixer shows an impressive improvement on output power of the high-order modulation due to the IM3 cancellation in the wide power region. The measured constellation figure also proves our analysis.
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