A Fully-Integrated 40 nm CMOS 58.1% PAE Push-Pull Class-E/F-odd Power Amplifier for NB-IoT Applications

This paper presents the design of a fully-integrated push-pull class-E/F-odd power amplifier (PA) for NarrowBand Internet of Things (NB-IoT). A cascode switch is utilized with source switching instead of gate switching to accommodate the high drain voltage stress. The design of the proposed PA is implemented using a 40 nm CMOS process with a 3.3 V supply for the core and a 1.2 V supply for the driver stage. Post-layout simulations show that the PA achieves peak power added efficiency (PAE) of 58.13 % at the peak output power of 31.12 dBm for the target frequency band 824-849 MHz. It also achieves a linear performance for the non-constant envelope signal imposed by the Single Carrier Frequency Division Multiple Access (SC-FDMA) with an average power added efficiency of 43.85 %.