1 research outputs found
Output Power and Gain Monitoring in RF CMOS Class A Power Amplifiers by Thermal Imaging
© 2019 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes,creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.The viability of using off-chip single-shot
imaging techniques for local thermal testing in integrated
Radio Frequency (RF) power amplifiers (PA’s) is analyzed.
With this approach, the frequency response of the output
power and power gain of a Class A RF PA is measured, also
deriving information about the intrinsic operation of its
transistors. To carry out this case study, the PA is
heterodynally driven, and its electrical behavior is down
converted into a lower frequency thermal field acquirable
with an InfraRed Lock-In Thermography (IR-LIT) system.
After discussing the theory, the feasibility of the proposed
approach is demonstrated and assessed with thermal
sensors monolithically integrated in the PA. As crucial
advantages to RF-testing, this local approach is noninvasive
and demands less complex instrumentation than
the mainstream commercially available solutions.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft