Co-design of power amplifier and narrowband filter using high-Q evanescent-mode cavity resonator as the output matching network

Abstract

A unique GaN power amplifier (PA) with an integrated evanescent-mode resonator as its output matching network is presented in this paper. Instead of matching the output of the GaN transistor to 50 Ω and connecting it to a 50-Ω bandpass filter, the GaN is directly integrated with a one-pole filter thus eliminating the conventionally-employed output matching network after the GaN transistor. This leads to a reduced circuit complexity and higher efficiency. The one-pole filter implemented by a strongly-coupled evanescent-mode cavity resonator with an unloaded quality factor of 320 is experimentally presented as a proof-of-concept demonstration. This design yields a very narrowband PA response from 1.24–1.275 GHz (2.8%), which is comparable to the bandwidth of typical communication signals. The PA exhibits a state-of-the-art performance of > 70% efficiency, > 10 dB gain, > 30 dBm output power, and second and third harmonic levels of < −70 dBc. The presented methodology has the potential to be further extended to a tunable design for multi-band applications.