A Co-design of Current Reuse RFPA and Compact Spiral Printed Antenna

A Co-design of on-chip radio frequency power amplifier (RFPA) and off-chip miniaturized spiral printed antenna is implemented at 2.4 GHz. The proposed RFPA structure is designed using TSMC 0.18 mu m CMOS technology with current reuse topology. Furthermore, load pull technique is used to evaluate the PA optimal load. The post layout of the proposed RFPA achieves a power-added efficiency of 33.3%, and more than 22 dB gain at an average output power of 15.6 dBm. The spiral shape of the proposed antenna is selected to achieve overall compact size, and for further miniaturization a lumped capacitor and a shorting pin are added resulting in more than 85% size reduction compared to the patch antennas. The antenna achieves maximum gain of 2.36 dBi.