A 24 GHz CMOS power amplifier with successive IM2 feed-forward IMD3 cancellation

Abstract

This paper demonstrates a successive second-order intermodulation feed-forward cancelling path, which can reduce the third-order intermodulation distortion (IMD3) of a 24 GHz cascode power amplifier (PA) effectively. By adopting this technique, the P <inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">sat</inf> , OP <inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1dB</inf> , and associated PAE are 16.6 dBm, 14.6 dBm, and 12.6%, respectively. The sweet-spot locates at 5 dBm output power with 20 dB IMD3 reduction. The P <inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">out</inf> with the IMD3 better than −40 dBc is 7.9 dBm which is 3.7 dB improvement compared with the PA with turn-off auxiliary path.