Low-Distortion and High-Efficiency 17 W Power GaAs FETs for Satellite Communication System Applications

摘要

We have developed a GaAs FET power amplifier that demonstrated a high PAE (Power-Added Efficiency) of 68/100 with 17.1 W output power and 16 dB linear gain at 1.5 GHz. The amplifier Also exhibited low distortion characteristics of less than-231 dBc NPR (Noise Power Ratio) at the 5 dB-output Power back-off point from 2 dB-gain compression point. These excellent results are obtained by optimizing Both the drain bias circuit and the internal matching network. We proved experimentally that distortion characteristics such a IMD (Inter-Modultion Distortion) or NR are drastically degraded when the Absolute value of the drain bias circuit impedance at low frequency are high.