Design of Broadband Continuous Mode MMIC Power Amplifiers With Bandwidth Improvement

This paper presents the design of continuous mode monolithic microwave integrated circuit (MMIC) power amplifiers (PAs) with bandwidth improvement. The output matching network (OMN) satisfying the continuous mode in broadband can be efficiently constructed with LC resonant circuits. The bandwidth can be further improved through generating the new LC unit in OMN with a minimum number of components added possible. Two prototype MMIC PAs are demonstrated with 0.25-µm Gallium Nitride (GaN) MMIC process. The measured drain efficiency is over 39.2% and 38.7% from 4.5 GHz to 6.5 GHz, respectively. When driven by 100-MHz modulated signals, two PAs exhibit great linearity performance with adjacent channel leakage ratio lower than −51.2 dBc and −53.4 dBc with digital predistortion.