A conventional cascode amplifier is shown in Fig. 1(a). Transistor M1 acts as a common source (CS) and transistor M2 acts as a common gate (CG). The RF signal is applied to G1. Gate, G2 is RF grounded with a dc value of Vdc which can be equal to the supply voltage V . The RF ground at G2 can be achieved by either an off-chip or an on-chip capacitance resonating with the bond-wire inductance. The dc voltage at D2 is equal to the supply voltage with an RF voltage swing around this value. At maximum output power, the voltage at D2 swings down close to zero and up to twice V . In order to increase the efficiency, the voltage can be shaped by the choice of the matching network. In the cascode configuration, transistor M1 has a smaller drain–gate voltage swing. This is because the voltage at D1 is always lower than voltage at G2 by an amount equal to the gate–source voltage of G2. Consequently, the supply voltage is limited by the breakdown voltage of M2 rather than M1.