Efficiency-enhanced inverted Doherty power amplifier with class-E peaking amplifier

In this design, the class-E amplifier is used as peaking amplifier in place of the class-C amplifier in the traditional inverted Doherty amplifier to obtain higher power-added efficiency. The load network of class-E peaking amplifier consists of one impedance matching network and two harmonic suppression structures. To validate the analysis, a 38 dBm inverted Doherty amplifier with class-E peaking amplifier is designed and fabricated at 1.96 GHz. The simulated results show that 11.5% and 1.1% power-added efficiency improvement is obtained in comparison to balanced class-AB amplifier and traditional inverted Doherty amplifier at an output power of 38dBm respectively. The second and third harmonics were measured to be less than -36dBc and -30dBc, respectively, at output power ranges of 24dBm to 38dBm.