Design of multioctave high‐efficiency power amplifier based on extended continuous Class‐B/J modes

Abstract

The bandwidth covered by contemporary communication technologies has reached over an octave. But most existing power amplifier (PA) configurations cannot meet this requirement while at the same time maintaining a high efficiency. Therefore, a novel structure for bandwidth enhancement at a high efficiency level is proposed together with the systematic design methodology in this article. The difficulty lies in the overlap of the fundamental and harmonic frequencies. On this issue, the extended continuous Class-B/J mode can extend the impedance of the second harmonic to a resistive-reactive and relax design requirements for overlapping design space of fundamental and second harmonic frequencies. Specifically, the presented innovative circuit structure uses the multiple frequencies matching method to manipulate four fundamental and the corresponding second harmonics frequency points simultaneously, which can further effectively expand the bandwidth on the basis of the extended continuous Class-B/J PA. To verify the validity of the proposed theory, a gallium nitride multioctave PA is designed, implemented, and measured. Measured results show a fractional bandwidth of 148.4% from 0.4 to 2.7 GHz, with drain efficiency of 63%-78%, saturated output power greater than 39 dBm, and large signal gain larger than 9 dB. For the single carrier WCDMA signal with a channel bandwidth of 3.84 MHz and a peak to average power ratio of 6 dB, the adjacent channel power ratio of −47.5 to −35 dBc and −42.8 to −31.5 dBc at an average output power of 33 and 36 dBm separately are achieved over the whole frequency band.