An Automated Framework for Switched-Capacitor Power Amplifier Implementation Verified in 65 nm CMOS

Abstract

This paper presents an automated design framework for Switched-Capacitor Power Amplifiers (SCPA). The framework automatically takes the specifications of SCPA as inputs, generates the layout of the corresponding SCPA and performs post parasitic extraction (PEX) simulation. The automation flow is implemented in Python and integrated with computer-aided design (CAD) tools. A prototype chip containing an SCPA generated from the proposed framework and an SCPA designed with the conventional custom design flow is presented and measurement results show that both SCPAs have less than 0.2dBm difference in maximum output power and less than 2.3% difference in efficiency while the proposed automation flow takes less than 2 hours.