This paper presents high-efficiency high-gain GHz power amplifiers (PAs) for wireless communications. Two class-B PAs are designed and verified in µm CMOS mixed-signal/RF process provided by TSMC. The PAs employs cascode topologies with wideband multi-stage matchings. The singlestage cascode PA is designed for a high power added efficiency (PAE) of while the gain is dB over the -3 dBbandwidth between GHz and GHz. The two-stage cascode PA is targeted for a high gain of dB while it exhibits a peak PAE of . Supplied by V supply voltages, the PAs consume DC powers of mW and 9 mW, respectively. | VNU Journal of Science: Comp. Science & Com. Eng., Vol. 33, No. 1 (2017) 1-7 High-Efficiency High-Gain GHz Class-B Power Amplifiers in µm CMOS for Wireless Communications Tuan Anh Vu∗, Tuan Pham Dinh, Duong Bach Gia VNU University of Engineering and Technology, Hanoi, Vietnam Abstract This paper presents high-efficiency high-gain GHz power amplifiers (PAs) for wireless communications. Two class-B PAs are designed and verified in µm CMOS mixed-signal/RF process provided by TSMC. The PAs employs cascode topologies with wideband multi-stage matchings. The singlestage cascode PA is designed for a high power added efficiency (PAE) of while the gain is dB over the -3 dBbandwidth between GHz and GHz. The two-stage cascode PA is targeted for a high gain of dB while it exhibits a peak PAE of . Supplied by V supply voltages, the PAs consume DC powers of mW and 9 mW, respectively. Received 28 December 2016; Accepted 20 February 2017 Keywords: Power Amplifier, Cascode, Multi-Stage, Wireless Communication. 1. Introduction* transconductance. The linearity and power efficiency are lower than other , with the trend of lower power transmitters in the next generation, implementation of CMOS PAs with good efficiencies are becoming realistic despite steadily declining field-effect transistor (FET) breakdown voltages. To improve the efficiency of the PAs, the trend is toward using class-B or class-AB topologies, which are more energy efficient compared to the class-A ones [2]. In this paper, we are going to present the designs and simulations of two class-B GHz PAs suitable for wireless communication standard including WiMAX, Bluetooth and Wifi. The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents fundamentals of power amplifiers. Section 3 introduces the architectures of the proposed class-B PAs including detailed descriptions of the circuit topologies. The simulation results are presented in section 4
