LDMOS Technology for RF Power Amplifiers

摘要

We show the status of laterally diffused metal–oxide–semiconductor (LDMOS) technology, which has been the device of choice for RF power applications for more than one decade. LDMOS fulfills the requirements for a wide range of class AB and pulsed applications, such as base station, broadcast, and microwave. We present state-of-the-art RF performance of the LDMOS transistor measured with a load–pull test setup, achieving class-AB drain efficiencies of 70% at 2 GHz for on-wafer and packaged devices. Furthermore, the results for several class-AB and Doherty amplifier implementations constructed with this technology are shown. As an illustration, a three-way Doherty application is demonstrated, which has a 7.5-dB back-off efficiency of 47% at 1.8 GHz with a peak power of 700 W and linearity numbers better than $-$65 dBc.