GaN HEMT MMIC Doherty Power Amplifier With High Gain and High PAE

Author

Yunsik Park ; Juyeon Lee ; Seunghoon Jee ; Seokhyeon Kim ; Cheol Ho Kim ; Bonghyuk Park ; Bumman Kim

Author_Institution

Div. of IT Convergence Eng., Pohang Univ. of Sci. & Technol. (POSTECH), Pohang, South Korea

Volume

25

Issue

3

fYear

2015

fDate

Mar-15

Firstpage

187

Lastpage

189

Abstract

This paper presents an approach to maximize the gain and power-added efficiency (PAE) of a Doherty power amplifier (PA) using a 0.25 μm GaN pHEMT. The conventional carrier PA has an input matching for the R_OPT load and does not deliver the 3 dB higher gain with 2R_OPT load due to the mismatch and it degrades gain and PAE of the PA. To solve the problem, the input match of the carrier PA is optimized at the back-off power level with the 2R_OPT output load, while the input is mismatched at a high power level. A Doherty PA with the concept is designed and implemented using a GaN pHEMT MMIC process at 1.8 GHz. The measured average output power, power-added efficiency and gain are 35.6 dBm, 56.3%, and 18.9 dB for a 10 MHz LTE signal with a 6.5 dB PAPR.

Keywords

III-V semiconductors; MMIC power amplifiers; UHF integrated circuits; UHF power amplifiers; gallium compounds; high electron mobility transistors; integrated circuit design; wide band gap semiconductors; GaN; LTE signal; PA; PAE; PAPR; efficiency 56.3 percent; frequency 1.8 GHz; frequency 10 MHz; gain 18.9 dB; gain 3 dB; noise figure 6.5 dB; pHEMT MMIC Doherty power amplifier; power-added efficiency; size 0.25 mum; Gain; Gallium nitride; Impedance; Impedance matching; MMICs; Modulation; Power generation; Doherty power amplifier (DPA); Gallium nitride (GaN); drain efficiency (DE); long term evolution (LTE); power-added efficiency (PAE);

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Microwave and Wireless Components Letters, IEEE

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

1531-1309

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/LMWC.2015.2390536

Filename

7017462