Co-design of an antenna-power amplifier RF front-end block without matching network for 2.4 GHz WiFi application

摘要

A co-design of an antenna-Power Amplifier (PA) block in RF front-end module is presented. This technique enables the direct integration of PA and antenna without any matching circuits and helps to reduce the loss, power consumption and overall size of the RF front-end modules without affecting the efficiency of the PA. For first two harmonics the impedance matching between the PA and antenna is achieved by utilizing a capacitively coupled feeding mechanism which controls the input impedance of the antenna. By using this integration technique a Class-B PA operating at 2.4 GHz provides a maximum efficiency of 62% which is similar to the performance with the additional matching circuit. Also the design methodology of the antenna is reported. The antenna provides an axial beam with a maximum gain of 6.5 dBi and has a radiation efficiency of 85%.