Abstract
The RF Power Amplifier (PA) is usually the bottleneck in designing high efficiency, high linearity wireless transceivers within any given power specification. Pico-cell basestation PAs deliver power in the range of 10 Watts, with aggressive gain and efficiency requirements for next generation cellular networks. The slightest variations in PA biasing or the input and output load networks can cause significant degradation in RF PA performance. This work discusses the impact of process variation and variability in input/output networks on RF performance, and suggests ways to regain various performance parameters through post fabrication tuning of the PA.