A broadband power amplifier design based on the extended resonance power combining technique

A 4-to-10 GHz power amplifier based on a modified extended resonance power combining technique is presented. The 4-device power amplifier presented here has a small signal gain of 9.9 dB with a 2-dB bandwidth of 6.5 GHz. More importantly, this design demonstrates an output power level of 31.9 dBm at 1-dB compression with power combining efficiencies around 90% over most of the bandwidth of interest. The modified extended resonant combining technique enables the design of planar-circuit based power amplifiers with compact layout and broadband performance similar to the distributed power amplifiers with improved power combining efficiency.