The development of multi-standard wireless communication systems with low cost and high integration is continuously requested and accompanied by the explosive growth of the wireless communication market. Although CMOS technology can provide most building blocks in RF transceivers, the implementation of CMOS RF power amplifiers is still a challenging task. The objective of this research is to develop design techniques to implement fully-integrated multi-mode power amplifiers using CMOS technology. In this dissertation, a load modulation technique with tunable matching networks and a pre-distortion technique in a multi-stage PA are proposed to support multi-communication standards with a single PA. A fully-integrated dual-mode GSM/EDGE PA was designed and implemented in a 0.18 um CMOS technology to achieve high output power for the GSM application and high linearity for the EDGE application. With the suggested power amplifier design techniques, fully-integrated PAs have been successfully demonstrated in GSM and EDGE applications. In Addition to the proposed techniques, a body-switched cascode PA core is also proposed to utilize a single PA in multi-mode applications without hurting the performance. With the proposed techniques, a fully-integrated multi-mode PA has been implemented in a 0.18 um CMOS technology, and the power amplifier has been demonstrated successfully for GSM/EDGE/WCDMA applications. In conclusion, the research in this dissertation provides CMOS RF power amplifier solutions for multiple standards in mobile wireless communications with low cost and high integration.

Energy-efficient radio frequency (RF) power amplifiers (PAs) are critical and paramount to achieve longer battery life in state-of-the-art portable systems because they typically determine and dominate the power consumption of such devices. In this dissertation, a high-efficiency, linear RF PA with a dynamically adaptive supply and bias current control for code division multiple access (CDMA) and wideband CDMA (WCDMA) is conceived, simulated, and experimentally demonstrated with a discrete PCB-level design and in integrated circuit (IC) form. The PA efficiency is improved by dynamically adjusting both its supply voltage and bias current, there by minimizing its quiescent power dissipation. The PA supply voltage is derived from the battery by a noninverting, synchronous buck-boost switching regulator because of its flexible functionality and high efficiency. Adjusting the PA supply voltage and bias current by tracking the output power, instead of following the complete envelope in large baseband bandwidth wireless applications, is achieved by a converter with a lower switching frequency and consequently higher light-load efficiency, which translates to prolonged battery life. A discrete PCB-level prototype of the proposed system with 915 MHz center frequency, CDMA IS-95 signal having 27-dBm peak-output power resulted in more than four times improvement in the average efficiency compared to a fixed-supply class-AB PA while meeting the required performance specifications. In the IC solution fabricated in AMIs 0.5-micron CMOS process through MOSIS, a dual-mode, buck-boost converter with pulse-width modulation (PWM) control for high power and pulse-frequency modulation (PFM) for low power is designed and implemented to improve the PA efficiency during active and standby operation, respectively. The performance of the dynamically adaptive supply and bias control IC was validated by realizing a 25-dBm, 1.96 GHz center frequency, WCDMA PA over an input supply range of 1.4 4.2 V. The PA with dual-mode power supply and bias control IC showed an average-efficiency improvement of seven times compared to a fixed-supply class-AB PA, which translates to five times improvement in battery life assuming the PA is active for 2 % of the total time and in standby mode otherwise.

The study, description, design and implementation of selected blocks of multiband shortwave radio station are dealt with in the thesis. Focus is placed on the concept of multiband shortwave radio stations, with an emphasis on high frequency and intermediate frequency circuits. The first chapter is devoted to description of the transceiver block diagram which is designed as superheterodyne. The design of bandpass input filters, intermediate frequency crystal filters and output filters is described. Simulation results and the measured characteristics of the implemented functional blocks are presented. Furthermore, the amplifier circuits which maintain impedance matching of individual blocks are discussed. SSB signal generation in the transmitter part of radio station and final stage power amplification are depicted.