Input‐harmonic manipulated wideband high‐efficiency series of continuous mode power amplifier

Abstract

SummaryIn this paper, a systematic research of the effects of second source harmonics caused by gate‐source capacitance in the design of a series of continuous mode (SCM) power amplifiers (PAs) is first presented. The research results show that, compared to the conventional SCMs that require the input second harmonic to be short circuited, SCMs under the impact of input nonlinearity have a more flexible input second harmonic manipulation space, and to further improve and maintain the performance of PAs in wideband operations, a new impedance design space is explored through analysis. For practical validation, SCMs PA considering the effects of the input nonlinearity is designed and fabricated with a 10‐W gallium nitride (GaN) device, acquiring 39.1–42 dBm output power and 60.6–71.5% drain efficiency (DE) performance at a 3 dB gain compression level operating over the 0.5–3.5 GHz frequency range with a relative bandwidth of 150%.