Inplay, Inc.

Russell Mohn

Ruifeng Liu

Yongru Gu

Qun Wu

Jun Tang

A class-D RF power amplifier (PA) architecture with duty cycle control has improved power efficiency while suppressing even-order harmonics. An inductor and capacitor (LC) low pass filter (LPF) can also be integrated on-chip to further suppress harmonics and provide impedance transformation between the PA and load. This eases the design for customers and reduce their bill of materials cost. The LPF can also match the PA to the load impedance to improve efficiency. The harmonic levels can also be controlled by adjusting the duty cycle of the PA output.

Radio frequency power amplifier

An advertising method for a low-power Bluetooth&#xae; device includes driving a finite state machine to obtain a pre-generated or external microcontroller input advertising packet definition; reading in the finite state machine the advertising content and the advertising channel in the advertising packet definition; driving the finite state machine to play the advertising content in the advertising channel. Using the finite state machine, that is, being able to play the advertising content in the advertising packet definition eliminates the need for complicated software development work of the Bluetooth&#xae; chip, enabling the Bluetooth&#xae; chip to advertising without software development, thus reducing the development cost of the Bluetooth&#xae; system, promoting the further wider adoption of low-power Bluetooth&#xae; technology, and promoting the development of the Internet of Things.

Advertising method and terminal for low-power bluetooth devices

A digitally modulated polar power amplifier uses a thin-oxide amplifying transistor with a protection diode. The polar power includes a driver amplifier in a driver stage that can receive a phase-modulated signal with a constant envelope and amplify the signal for the output stage, which includes only a single thin-oxide transistor, leading to improved efficiency over systems that require a thick-oxide transistor. A protection diode can be added between the output of the polar power amplifier and the supply voltage to limit the output to the sum of the supply voltage plus the forward voltage of the diode. Amplitude modulation can be achieved through dynamically turning on and off the digital power amplifier via an amplitude control word (acw) input signal.

Digitally modulated polar power amplifier

Semiconductor chips are made increasingly smaller, thanks to improved design techniques and process scaling. Sometimes the bottleneck is not the chip itself but the package size due to many necessary pins. To help reduce the number of package pins, the chip should use less pins by sharing or reusing pins if possible. Therefore, single-ended RF input/output is used for transceiver, and the same pin is shared between RX and TX. A receiver (RX)-transmitter (TX) impedance co-matching method uses multiple bondwires for transceivers sharing one input/output (I/O) pin between RX and TX. The RX input impedance and TX output impedance are transformed closer to each other or even to the same impedance, which makes it possible to get the best RX and TX performance with just one matching network. The chip area is also saved without using on-chip inductors.

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Santa Ana, CA, United States of America

Russell Mohn