Design of Ultrawideband High-Efficiency Extended Continuous Class-F Power Amplifier

Abstract

Total bandwidth of existing wireless communication technologies covers a wide frequency range of over one octave. But most existing power amplifier configurations cannot meet this requirement while at the same time maintaining a high efficiency. Therefore, a new structure that can achieve multioctave bandwidth is proposed in this paper together with the design methodology. The difficulty in realizing a bandwidth larger than one octave lies in the overlapping of fundamental and harmonic frequencies. Regarding this problem, the continuous class-F mode is extended to allow a resistive second harmonic impedance, rather than the pure reactive one. With the relaxed design requirements and overlapping design space of fundamental and second harmonic frequencies, harmonic tuning and fundamental frequency matching networks can be designed separately. More importantly, broadband matching for fundamental frequencies can be implemented simply by considering only three fundamental frequency points using the multiple frequencies matching method. To verify the validity of the proposed methodology, a multioctave power amplifier was designed, fabricated, and measured. Measured results verify a wide bandwidth of 128.5% from 0.5 to 2.3 GHz. Over this frequency range, drain efficiency was larger than 60% with output power greater than 39.2 dBm and large signal gain larger than 11.7 dB.