Design of A Transformer-Based Reconfigurable Digital Polar Doherty Power Amplifier Fully Integrated in Bulk CMOS

This paper presents a digital polar Doherty power amplifier (PA) fully integrated in a 65 nm bulk CMOS process. It achieves + 27.3 dBm peak output power and 32.5% peak PA drain efficiency at 3.82 GHz and 3.60 GHz, respectively. The proposed digital Doherty PA architecture optimizes the cooperation of the main and auxiliary amplifiers and achieves superior back-off efficiency enhancement (a maximum 47.9% improvement versus the corresponding Class-B operation). This digital intensive architecture also allows in-field PA reconfigurability which both provides robust PA operation against antenna mismatches and allows flexible trade-off optimization on PA efficiency and linearity. Transformer-based passives are employed as the Doherty input and output networks. The input 90 signal splitter is realized by a 6-port folded differential transformer structure. The active Doherty load modulation and power combining at the PA output are achieved by two transformers in a parallel configuration. These transformer-based passives ensure an ultra-compact PA design (2.1 mm) and broad bandwidth (24.9% for 1 dB P bandwidth). Measurement with 1 MSym/s QPSK signal shows 3.5% rms EVM with + 23.5 dBm average output power and 26.8% PA drain efficiency. Measurement with 16-QAM signal exhibits the PA's flexibility on optimizing efficiency and linearity.