Design Guidelines for a Novel Tapered Drain Line Distributed Power Amplifier

In this paper, the analysis, design, and measured results of a novel tapered drain line distributed power amplifier are presented. The prototype tapered drain line distributed power amplifier has a gain of 10 dB, power-added-efficiency of about 24%, and output power of about 18dBm, over a 4.5 GHz bandwidth. The drain line impedance tapering technique is shown to significantly increase the efficiency and output power of a distributed amplifier. The topology of the tapered drain line distributed power amplifier is suitable for monolithic implementation