Design of a High-Efficiency Doherty Power Amplifier for 5G Applications Using Wilkinson Power Divider

Abstract

In this paper, a novel Doherty Power Amplifier DPA based on a 10 W gallium-nitride high-electron-mobility transistor (GaN-HEMT) technology is designed using Advanced Design System (ADS) software. In the design, two different single Power Amplifiers (PAs) are combined using a Wilkinson power divider which is also used to connect the power to the load. The designed DPA operates in the range of 2.0-3.0 GHz and aims to achieve high efficiency, wide bandwidth and high output power for 5G applications. Simulation results showed a 40% fractional bandwidth and more than 44 dBm of saturated output power. In addition, the Power-Added Efficiency (PAE) and Drain-efficiency (Deff) are about 77% and 84%, respectively. A comparison with the other previous works shows enhancement in the maximum large-signal gain (L_S_Gain) in the average of 2.5 dB and an average PAE of about 10%. This improvement can be attributed to the deployment of the power divider/combiner proposed in the design and also the optimization of the components during the design.