It is hardly a profound observation to note that we remain in the midst of a wireless revolution. In 1998 alone, over 150 million cell phones were sold worldwide, representing an astonishing 50% increase over the previous year. Maintaining such a remarkable growth rate requires constant innovation to decrease cost while increasing performance and functionality. Traditionally, wireless products have depended on a mixture of semicond- tor technologies, spanning GaAs, bipolar and BiCMOS, just to name a few. A question that has been hotly debated is whether CMOS could ever be suitable for RF...

Improving the performance of the power amplifier is the most pressing problem facing designers of modern radio-frequency (RF) transceivers. Linearity and power efficiency of the transmit path are of utmost importance, and the power amplifier has proven to be the bottleneck for both. High linearity enables transmission at the highest data rates for a given channel bandwidth, and power efficiency prolongs battery lifetime in portable units and reduces heat dissipation in high-power transmitters. Cartesian feedback is a power amplifier linearization technique that acts to soften the tradeoff...