"BiCMOS RF analog front-end pre-driver design for 5G NR transmitter line-up"

New generation cellular telecommunication networks (5G and 6G) are heavily increasing the transmission data-rates. This goal is basically achieved by scaling up system's frequency of operation, using more sophisticated modulation methods and enlarging the number of transmitting and receiving devices (MIMO systems). These improvements clearly push towards a fully-integrated approach for antenna-driving circuits realization. In this context integrated power amplifiers (PAs) have a key role if bandwidth, output power and efficiency are reasonably considered as most important circuit performance indicators. The Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) modulation technique allows a smart spectrum utilization. However this produces a high Peak-to-Average Power Ratio (PAPR) of all the signals physically going through the channel, leading to low efficiency in the final RF power amplifier. Doherty PAs are widely used for base station transmitters of cellular telecommunications systems because of their good linearity and efficiency over a considerably large input power range. The presented work is focused focused on the design of a pre-driver - in 130nm BiCMOS Infineon Technology - delivering 33dBm uncompressed differential active power to the driving circuit of a Doherty power amplifier, over a 900 MHz bandwidth (3.3 GHz - 4.2 GHz). The amplifier topology will be a differential cascode amplifier closed within a feedback loop, allowing for impedance matching at the interfaces. The final circuit will be taped out and measured under different conditions to check performances and reliability of such an high power version of the amplifier.