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Analysis and Design of Highly Efficient Wideband RF-Input Sequential Load Modulated Balanced Power Amplifier
Date Issued
2020-05
Date Available
2020-11-26T11:32:47Z
Abstract
The analysis and design of an RF-input sequential load modulated balanced power amplifier (SLMBA) are presented in this article. Unlike the existing LMBAs, in this new configuration, an over-driven class-B amplifier is used as the carrier amplifier while the balanced PA pair is biased in class-C mode to serve as the peaking amplifier. It is illustrated that the sequential operation greatly extends the high-efficiency power range and enables the proposed SLMBA to achieve high back-off efficiency across a wide bandwidth. An RF-input SLMBA at 3.05-3.55-GHz band using commercial GaN transistors is designed and implemented to validate the proposed architecture. The fabricated SLMBA attains a measured 9.5-10.3-dB gain and 42.3-43.7-dBm saturated power. Drain efficiency of 50.9-64.9/ 46.8-60.7/43.2-51.4% is achieved at 6-/8-/10-dB output power back-off within the designed bandwidth. By changing the bias condition of the carrier device, higher than 49.1% drain efficiency can be obtained within the 12.8-dB output power range at 3.3 GHz. When driven by a 40-MHz orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) signal with 8-dB peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR), the proposed SLMBA achieves adjacent channel leakage ratio (ACLR) better than -25 dBc with an average efficiency of 63.2% without digital predistortion (DPD). When excited by a ten-carrier 200-MHz OFDM signal with 10-dB PAPR, the average efficiency can reach 48.2% and -43.9-dBc ACLR can be obtained after DPD.
Sponsorship
European Commission Horizon 2020
Science Foundation Ireland
Other Sponsorship
Trinity College Dublin (TCD)
Type of Material
Journal Article
Publisher
IEEE
Journal
IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques
Volume
68
Issue
5
Start Page
1741
End Page
1753
Copyright (Published Version)
2020 IEEE
Language
English
Status of Item
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0018-9480
This item is made available under a Creative Commons License
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