Design of a Dual-Input Dual-Output Power Amplifier With Flexible Power Allocation

Abstract

While dual-output power amplifiers (PAs) have shown great potential in the area of radar, satellite, and wireless communication systems, the flexibility of the power allocation in the dual-output PAs should be improved without sacrificing efficiency and circuit complexity. This letter presents a dual-input dual-output (DIDO) PA to enable flexible power allocation based on a simple circuit topology. It is demonstrated that not only power transfer from one output port to the other, but also flexible power allocation between two output ports can be obtained by the proposed DIDO PA. Meanwhile, optimal drain efficiency (DE) can be maintained when different power is delivered to the two output ports of the DIDO PA by controlling the input conditions. As a proof of concept, a DIDO PA operating at 2.4 GHz is fabricated and measured in this letter. The fabricated DIDO PA could deliver a total output power of more than 44 dBm and the total power can be allocated between two output ports. The maximum DE of the DIDO PA ranges from 71.8% to 75.6% over the 360° input phase difference.