A high gain SiGe-GaN switching power amplifier in the GHz-range

Author

Heck, S. ; Bräckle, A. ; Berroth, M. ; Maroldt, S. ; Quay, R.

Author_Institution

Inst. of Electr. & Opt., Univ. of Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany

fYear

2012

fDate

15-17 April 2012

Firstpage

1

Lastpage

4

Abstract

This paper reports a GaN switching power amplifier with a complementary SiGe driver stage in a hybrid setup. The gain of the overall amplifier module is higher than 40 dB. Drain efficiency and an overall lineup efficiency of 60 % and 47 % respectively could be achieved at a bit rate of 1 Gbps when operating with a periodic drive signal. An operation up to 4 Gbps using a pseudo random pulse sequence is demonstrated. To the author´s knowledge, this is the first time a GaN switching amplifier with a SiGe driver is demonstrated. Furthermore, such a high gain combined with the efficiencies at bit rates above 1 Gbps has not been presented yet.

Keywords

Ge-Si alloys; III-V semiconductors; driver circuits; gallium compounds; microwave power amplifiers; wide band gap semiconductors; SiGe-GaN; amplifier module; bit rate 1 Gbit/s; complementary driver stage; drain efficiency; high-gain switching power amplifier; lineup efficiency; periodic drive signal; pseudo random pulse sequence; Bit rate; Gallium nitride; Logic gates; Modulation; Power amplifiers; Silicon germanium; Transistors; class-S; digital transmitter; gallium nitride; power amplifier; pulse-width modulation; silicon germanium; switching amplifier;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Wireless and Microwave Technology Conference (WAMICON), 2012 IEEE 13th Annual

Conference_Location

Cocoa Beach, FL

Print_ISBN

978-1-4673-0129-9

Electronic_ISBN

978-1-4673-0128-2

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/WAMICON.2012.6208469

Filename

6208469