A CMOS power amplifier for full-band UWB transmitters

We present the development of a CMOS power amplifier covering full-band of emerging ultra wide-band (UWB) applications. The UWB amplifier is designed using a combined high-pass and low-pass artificial transmission line architecture to achieve high output power and spectrum pre-shaping for UWB signals. The amplifier is implemented in 180 nm RF CMOS technology and achieves a measured transducer gain of 10.46 dB with corner frequencies at 3 GHz and 12.6 GHz. The measured return loss is less than -10 dB through the whole UWB bandwidth. The measured output power at 1 dB compression point (P-1dB) is above 5.6 dBm from 3 to 10 GHz. The measured output-referred third-order intercept point is more than 16.6 dBm. The group delay dispersion is near zero within the passband, and the time domain pulse measurements indicate that the faithful signal reproduction can be achieved for wideband signals.