A 20 watt, two-stage, broadband LDMOS power amplifier IC in PQFN8×8 package at 2 GHz for wireless applications

A 20 Watt LDMOS radio frequency integrated circuit (RFIC) targeting 2 GHz macro cell and small cell base station applications has been developed using state of the art LDMOS technology and a unique, proprietary Power Quad Flat No-Lead (PQFN) package. The broadband amplifier was designed to cover the 1.7 GHz to 2.3 GHz frequency band and performs exceptionally well under multi-mode, multi-band conditions. The two-stage, single-chip design exhibits 32 dB of gain and delivers 24 Watts of output power at 1 dB compression with an associated PAE of 50%. For three-carrier CDMA signal and one-carrier LTE signal with a total signal bandwidth of 65 MHz, at 7 dB backoff from 1 dB compression, the corrected ACP with digital pre-distortion is lower than -63 dBc. This is the highest power, 1.7 to 2.3 GHz, two-stage LDMOS RFIC in a PQFN8×8 package, reported to date.