38 IEEE MICROWAVE AND WIRELESS COMPONENTS LETTERS, VOL. 22, NO.
1, JANUARY 2012
A GSM Power Amplifier Directly-Powered
From a DC-DC Power Converter
Chengwu Tao, Student Member, IEEE, and Ayman A. Fayed, Senior Member, IEEE
Abstract—A commercial off-the-shelf GSM PA powered directly
from a DC-DC converter is presented. The converter is imple-
mented in 0 35 m CMOS and employs frequency hopping with
phase chopping to eliminate spurious noise. Measurement results
demonstrate elimination of spurs, allowing an incompliant GSM
PA that is violating the limits of the GSM spectral mask by 9.3 dB
to be brought back to compliance without additional filtering or
linear regulation between the converter and the PA.
Index Terms—Buck converters, DC-DC converters, power am-
plifiers, switching regulators.
I. INTRODUCTION
P OWER amplifierS (PA) are typically the largest power
drain in the front-end of RF transmitters, and therefore
their power efficiency is critical for determining the overall
power consumption in mobile devices. To meet the maximum
output power requirements of some PAs, it is common to power
them directly from the battery (e.g., Li-Ion) to leverage its
higher voltage. However, at back-off output power, operating
directly from the battery becomes very energy inefficient,
especially in linear PAs. Since most of the time the PA does
not operate at maximum output power, lower efficiency at low
output power levels leads to poor overall system efficiency.
PA efficiency at low output power levels can be significantly
improved by using an adaptive power supply that scales down
with the PA output power. Since the battery voltage can’t be
scaled on demand, an intermediate power converter between
the battery and the PA would be necessary. DC-DC power con-
verters are very attractive for fulfilling this role as they offer high
power conversion efficiency [1]. However, due to the spurious
switching noise present at their output, they lead to difficulties
in meeting the spectral mask requirements of the PA due to spu-
rious noise mixing with the RF carrier signal.
There have been several methods reported for mitigating the
impact of the spurious noise of DC-DC converters on RF loads.
One method is to follow the DC-DC converter with a passive
filter and a low-dropout linear regulator (LDO) to suppress the
spurious noise. However, this method constitutes efficiency loss
due to the LDO, in addition to the size and cost implications of
Manuscript received August 15, 2011; revised October 10, 2011; accepted
November 06, 2011. Date of publication December 16, 2011; date of current
version January 11, 2012. This work was supported by a GIVF grant.
The authors are with the Power Management Research Lab, Department of
Electrical and Computer Engineering, Iowa State University, Ames, IA 50011
USA (e-mail: ctao@iastate.edu; aafayed@iastate.edu).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LMWC.2011.2176477
1531-1309/$26.00 © 2011 IEEE
passive filtering. Moreover, at the common switching frequen-
cies of DC-DC converters (3 to 6 MHz), LDOs perform very
poorly in terms of power supply rejection (PSR) [2], which fur-
ther limits the effectiveness of LDOs in suppressing spurious
noise. Some techniques rely on altering the switching behavior
of DC-DC converters, such as frequency hopping/stepping and
modulation. However, the reduction in spurs is either
limited to 10 to 12 dB [3]–[5], or results in more than 25 dB
increase in the random noise floor [6], [7], hence requiring a
subsequent LDO [2].
In this paper, we present a control technique that fully elim-
inates the spurious noise in DC-DC converters. The converter
is directly loaded by a commercial off-the-shelf GSM PA and
measurement results demonstrate the spur-free operation. The
results confirm that the presented converter can serve as a vi-
able option for directly powering PAs in RF front-ends without
additional filtering or post regulation, while maintaining a near
ideal-supply PA performance.
II. PROPOSED SWITCHING POWER CONVERTER
Fig. 1 shows the implementation of a spur-free Buck power
converter. The converter employs PWM-control with type-III
compensation to ensure its stability and uses a combination of
random frequency hopping and random phase chopping to elim-
inate all switching spurs [8]. The converter accepts a ramp signal
with a frequency that is randomly-selected from a set of eight
frequencies generated by a ramp signal generator in order to ac-
complish frequency hopping. The ramp generator maintains the
ramp signal at the same voltage levels and regardless
of the frequency selected, and allows a change in the switching
frequency only when a ramp cycle is complete [8]. This mech-
anism ensures that the steady state switching duty-cycle dc of
the converter is preserved while hopping between different fre-
quencies, and thus eliminates the large output transients that re-
sult from instantaneous changes in the switching frequency of
power converters, which often lead to significant degradation
in the performance of the load. Moreover, the elimination of
duty-cycle disturbance enables the converter to hop at a rate as
rapid as every ramp cycle, which maximizes the spreading ef-
fect in the converter [8].
Frequency hopping alone can only reduce switching spurs
but not eliminate them. In fact, only 10 dB reduction is ac-
complished with eight frequencies [3], [4], and 64 frequencies
are needed for 12 dB reduction in [5]. This limitation can be
explained using Fig. 2, which analyzes the spectrum of the
switching node of the converter. Only two hopping
frequencies are considered for simplicity. One can analyze the
spectrum resulting from frequency hopping using traditional
binary FSK and Fourier analysis [9]. The frequency-hopped
TAO AND FAYED: A GSM POWER AMPLIFIER DIRECTLY-POWERED FROM A DC-DC POWER CONVERTER
Fig. 1. Block diagram of the control loop of the buck converter.
Fig. 2. Wave forms describing the behavior of the switching node V
converter in (a) Time domain, and (b) Frequency domain.
signal is divided into two components, and
, where each component can be viewed as the result
of amplitude modulation between the random unipolar digital
sequences and (the modulating signals) and the vir-
tual carrier signals and respectively. However,
as shown in Fig. 2(b), both and always contain a
dc component (a spur at DC) since both are unipolar signals.
Therefore, after modulating the carrier signals, spurs at dc will
be up-converted to the carrier frequencies and their harmonics
causing spurs to appear in the output spectrum.
In order to overcome this limitation, the proposed converter
introduces phase chopping to fully eliminate switching spurs
[8]. To understand how this is accomplished, one must first rec-
ognize that each time a frequency is selected by the ramp gen-
erator, it experiences a phase jump from its corresponding vir-
tual carrier signal. This can be seen in Fig. 2(a) by comparing
the phases of and to the carrier signals
39
TABLE I
SUMMARY OF KEY OPERATION ASPECTS OF THE PROPOSED CONVERTER
and at the hopping instants. Therefore, the phases of
and appear to be chopped relatively to the car-
rier signals, which is mathematically equivalent to modulating
the amplitude of the digital sequences and at every
hopping instant. This modulation converts them to bipolar se-
quences rather than unipolar ones, where their dc components
can now be made exactly zero by ensuring that [8]:
(1)
where is the total number of hopping frequencies, is the
maximum hopping frequency, and are the rest of the hopping
frequencies. Moreover, and are arbitrary positive integers
chosen for each frequency such that the relation between any
and conforms to the condition in (1). Meeting this con-
dition eliminates the dc components of and , and
consequently spurs in the converter’s output spectrum.
III. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS WITH GSM PA
A step-down DC-DC converter (Buck) is implemented based
on the presented technique in standard CMOS tech-
nology. The input voltage is between 3.8 and 5 V, similar to
Li-Ion battery levels, while the output is programmable and
covers a range from 1.3 V to 3.6 V. The converter can be set to
of the
normal mode (single switching frequency) or a spur-free mode
with eight frequencies that meet the condition specified in (1).
Table I summarizes the frequencies used as well as other key
implementation and performance aspects of the converter. As
shown, the proposed spur-free mode has negligible impact on
the efficiency of the converter. The proposed converter was then
used to power a commercial off-the-shelf GSM PA [10]. The
converter used a 4.2 V input power source to generate a power
supply for the PA. The output of the converter was varied from
2.7 to 3.6 V and the overall collector efficiency of the combined
converter and PA was measured at different output power levels.
The efficiency of the PA alone when powered straight from the
4.2 V input source was also recorded for comparison. Table II
shows a summary of the results, which demonstrates that using
the proposed converter as an intermediate regulation step be-
tween the 4.2 V supply and the PA improves the power effi-
ciency by a factor as high as 2 across all power levels.
In order to demonstrate the spectral performance of the PA
when powered by the converter, the PA was powered in the fol-
lowing three scenarios: a) directly from a 3.0 V ideal power
40 IEEE MICROWAVE AND WIRELESS COMPONENTS LETTERS, VOL. 22, NO. 1, JANUARY 2012
TABLE II
OVERALL COLLECTOR EFFICIENCY COMPARISON BETWEEN THE
PA ALONE AND THE COMBINED PA AND BUCK CONVERTER
Fig. 3. GSM PA output spectrum at 0 dBm output power (a) Non-modulated
carrier (RBW = 1 kHz), and (b) Modulated carrier (RBW = 30 kHz). In
all cases the PA power supply is 3.0 V and the buck converter input is 4.2 V.
supply, b) directly from the buck converter in normal mode,
and c) directly from the buck converter in spur-free mode. In
scenarios b) and c), the buck converter’s input and output were
4.2 V and 3.0 V, respectively, and there was no additional pas-
sive filtering of any kind applied to the power supply. Measure-
ments were carried out both with non-modulated and modulated
carrier (GSM) at 0 dBm output power. This low output power
level was chosen because it delivers the worst case spur per-
formance due to the low output power compared to the buck
converter’s spurs. Fig. 3 shows the measurement results in the
aforementioned scenarios. With a carrier only [Fig. 3(a)], spurs
due to the buck converter in normal mode are quite strong at
2.46 MHz offset (the switching frequency of the converter). In
the spur-free mode, the spur is fully eliminated. This comes at
the expense of a higher noise floor, which is minimized by hop-
ping at the maximum rate in the converter. The results with GSM
modulated data along with the GMSK spectral mask are shown
in Fig. 3(b). In the normal mode, an image of the modulated data
due to mixing between the carrier and the DC-DC spur appears
and violates the spectral mask, whereas in spur-free mode, the
image is eliminated as mixing is avoided altogether.
Due to full spur elimination, the presented converter offers
fundamental advantages over previously-reported spur-reduced
converters such as [3]–[5]. In these techniques, a single large
DC-DC spur is divided into several smaller and closely-located
ones. Therefore, mixing between these smaller spurs and the
carrier continues to take place and produces several overlap-
ping images where their energy adds up. While an improve-
ment is achievable over the case with a single large spur, this
overlap between the images significantly limits this improve-
ment. Moreover, the low hopping rate required in [3], [4] limits
the achievable reduction in spurs far from the theoretical limit.
The presented converter mitigates these limitations and pro-
duces a spur-free spectrum, making it suitable for applications
that require high spectral purity.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank H. Sasmazer, M. Yao, and D.
Cripe from Rockwell Collins, for technical and funding support.
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