A 2.4 GHz Differential Class-E power Amplifier with on-chip Transformers for Bluetooth systems

Abstract

This work presents the design and simulation of a differential class-E Power Amplifier (PA) for class-1 Bluetooth systems in 0.13 μm RF CMOS technology. The proposed PA can deliver 21.57 dBm output power to a 50 Ω load at 2.4 GHz with 65.59 % Power-Added-Efficiency (PAE) from 1 V supply voltage. In order to achieve fully integrated PA, on-chip balun transformers are designed and improved for converting single-ended input signal to differential signal in the input side and differential signal to single-ended output signal in the output side. The results are obtained using microwave office 2009 (version 9.00).