In recent years significant attempts have been made to develop silicon-based technologies to provide high level integration of RFIC's for low-cost/low-power/high-volume wireless communication applications. The major components of the enabling technology for single-chip integration should ideally include low power CMOS devices, low noise BJT devices, high frequency power transistors, and high Q-factor on-chip inductors. Furthermore, all of these devices should be properly isolated. In a single-chip approach for portable wireless applications, the most difficult task is to integrate the RF power amplifier. For silicon-based technologies, only discrete RF power amplifiers using bulk silicon power MOSFETs or Lateral Double-diffused MOS Transistors (LDMOSTs) have been reported, and no integ...[ Read more ]

In recent years significant attempts have been made to develop silicon-based technologies to provide high level integration of RFIC's for low-cost/low-power/high-volume wireless communication applications. The major components of the enabling technology for single-chip integration should ideally include low power CMOS devices, low noise BJT devices, high frequency power transistors, and high Q-factor on-chip inductors. Furthermore, all of these devices should be properly isolated. In a single-chip approach for portable wireless applications, the most difficult task is to integrate the RF power amplifier. For silicon-based technologies, only discrete RF power amplifiers using bulk silicon power MOSFETs or Lateral Double-diffused MOS Transistors (LDMOSTs) have been reported, and no integrated power amplifier has been reported so far. In this work, a SOI LDMOS/CMOS/BJT technology for fully-integrated RF wireless transceiver applications is developed. This technology allows the complete integration of the front-end circuits with the baseband circuits for low-cost/low-power/ high-volume production of single-chip transceivers. Using this technology, a fully-functional high performance integrated RF power amplifier (IPA) for 900MHz wireless transceiver application is designed and fabricated for the first time. The IPA is a 2-stage Class E power amplifier. It is fabricated along with the on-chip input and output matching networks. Thus, no external components are needed. At 900MHz and with a 5V supply, the power amplifier delivers +23dBm output power to a 50ω load with 16dB gain and 49% power added efficiency.