Abstract
A novel design methodology for two stages microwave monolithic integrated circuit (MMIC) power amplifier (PA) is presented. The proposed solution allows to almost null the phase distortions (AM/PM) without worsening other key features of the PA, such as amplitude distortion (AM/AM) and efficiency. The derived approach is verified presenting the design and the experimental characterization of a two stages GaN MMIC PA for Microwave Backhaul radio links. The MMIC has been developed in a commercial 0.25 μm GaN power process, resulting in a 3×3 mm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> chip area. At 7 GHz, the realized module shows 6 W of saturated output power, 17 dB of gain, 63% of power added efficiency and less than 1.5 degree of phase distortion. Moreover, when tested with modulated signals (i.e., 256 QAM modulation scheme, 7 dB of PAPR), the PA shows a spectral regrow lower than -40 dBc at 32 dBm of average output power without any predistortion, while the average efficiency is around 30%.
Published Version
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