Psemi Corporation

Peregrine Semiconductor Corporation

Chih-Chieh Cheng

Tero Tapio Ranta

Kevin Roberts

Emre Ayranci

Miles Sanner

Damian Costa

James Francis McElwee

Ke Li

Richard Bryon Whatley

Christopher C Murphy

Vikram Sekar

Hossein Noori

An improved architecture for a radio frequency (RF) power amplifier, impedance matching network, and selector switch. One aspect of embodiments of the invention is splitting the functionality of a final stage impedance matching network (IMN) into two parts, comprising a base set of off-chip IMN components and an on-chip IMN tuning component. The on-chip IMN tuning component may be a digitally tunable capacitor (DTC). In one embodiment, an integrated circuit having a power amplifier, an on-chip IMN tuner, and a selector switch is configured to be coupled to an off-chip set of IMN components. In another embodiment, an integrated circuit having an on-chip IMN tuner and a selector switch is configured to be coupled through an off-chip set of IMN components to a separate integrated circuit having an RF power amplifier.

RF switch with split tunable matching network

A flexible multi-path RF adaptive tuning network switch architecture that counteracts impedance mismatch conditions arising from various combinations of coupled RF band filters, particularly in a Carrier Aggregation-based (CA) radio system. In one version, a digitally-controlled tunable matching network is coupled to a multi-path RF switch in order to provide adaptive impedance matching for various combinations of RF band filters. Optionally, some or all RF band filters include an associated digitally-controlled filter pre-match network to further improve impedance matching. In a second version, some or all RF band filters coupled to a multi-path RF switch include a digitally-controlled phase matching network to provide necessary per-band impedance matching. Optionally, a digitally-controlled tunable matching network may be included on the common port of the multi-path RF switch to provide additional impedance matching capability. In a third version, CA direct mapped adaptive tuning networks include filter tuning blocks for selected lower frequency bands.

Adaptive tuning networks with direct mapped multiple channel filter tuning

A power detector with wide dynamic range. The power detector includes a linear detector, followed by a voltage-to-current-to-voltage converter, which is then followed by an amplification stage. The current-to-voltage conversion in the converter is performed logarithmically. The power detector generates a desired linear-in-dB response at the output. In this power detector, the distribution of gain along the signal path is optimized in order to preserve linearity, and to minimize the impact of offset voltage inherently present in electronic blocks, which would corrupt the output voltage. Further, the topologies in the sub-blocks are designed to provide wide dynamic range, and to mitigate error sources. Moreover, the temperature sensitivity is designed out by either minimizing temperature variation of an individual block such as the v-i-v detector, or using two sub-blocks in tandem to provide overall temperature compensation. In one aspect, active resistors are used in order to compensate for temperature variations.

Power detector with wide dynamic range

Methods and devices for providing a feedback network in a multi-stage power amplifier are described. According to one aspect, a final amplifier of the multi-stage power amplifier is a cascode amplifier. The feedback network is placed between an output of the final amplifier and an output of a driver amplifier. The feedback network can decrease a mismatch between the output impedance of the final amplifier and a load presented to the final amplifier. In addition, the feedback network can change a load presented to the driver amplifier and thereby allow the transfer functions of each stage to be tuned so that the overall transfer function of the multi-stage amplifier becomes more linear.

Multi-stage stacked power amplifier feedback circuit for improved performance

Methods and devices for improving AM-AM and AM-PM performance of an RF amplifier are presented. According to one aspect, input and output harmonic terminations coupled to the input and output of the amplifier are tuned at frequencies near to, but different than, a second harmonic frequency of an RF signal to be amplified. Improved AM-AM and AM-PM performance is obtained when i) the input harmonic termination is tuned at a frequency that is below the second harmonic frequency and the output harmonic termination is tuned at a frequency that is above the second harmonic frequency, and ii) the input harmonic termination is tuned at a frequency that is farther away from the second harmonic frequency than the frequency used for tuning of the output harmonic termination.

Second harmonic terminations for AM-AM and AM-PM suppression

A high performance integrated tunable impedance matching network with coupled merged inductors. Embodiments include a combination of merged multiport constructively coupled spiral inductors and tunable capacitors configured to reduce insertion losses, circuit size, and optimization time while maintaining a high Q factor for the coupled spiral inductors. Some embodiments integrate one or more filter circuits with a tunable impedance matching network, useful in conjunction with such applications as radio frequency power amplifiers.

Tunable and integrated impedance matching and filter circuit

A receiver front end capable of receiving and processing intraband non-contiguous carrier aggregate (CA) signals using multiple low noise amplifiers (LNAs) is disclosed herein. A cascode having a 'common source' input stage and a 'common gate' output stage can be turned on or off using the gate of the output stage. A first switch is provided that allows a connection to be either established or broken between the source terminal of the input stage of each cascode. Further switches used for switching degeneration inductors, gate/sources caps and gate to ground caps for each legs can be used to further improve the matching performance of the invention.

LNA with programmable linearity

A ultra-compact coupler designed to sample the actual output power of a power amplifier and which is 'VSWR insensitive', such that reflected power is essentially not coupled to a detector circuit and only forward power is detected and processed. In a first embodiment, a coupler is situated between the final amplifier stage of a power amplifier and an output impedance matching network, and is specially configured for operation in a low impedance environment in conjunction with a detector circuit, thereby substantially reducing the areal size of the coupler. In a second embodiment, a coupler is integrated within an output impedance matching network coupled to the final amplifier stage of a power amplifier so as to share an inductor between the coupler and the output impedance matching network, thereby further substantially reducing the areal size of the coupler.

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Poway, CA, United States of America

Chih-Chieh Cheng