BROADBAND HIGH-EFFICIENCY POWER AMPLIFIER WITH HARMONIC SUPPRESSION BASED ON LOAD-PULL TECHNIQUE

摘要

In this letter, a novel design method for broadband and efficient power amplifier (PA) is proposed and a broadband PA with a compact matching topology is designed and fabricated to verify the validity of the method. In the method, specific attention has been paid to harmonic suppression to enhance efficiency and an appropriate design space of the fundamental and harmonic impedances, based on load-pull technique which actually takes into account of the influences of the parasitics, is found to alleviate the difficulty of designing broadband matching network. Then a compact matching network topology is proposed to lead the fundamental and second harmonic impedances to the design space on the Smith chart over a wide bandwidth, simultaneously. The fabricated PA exhibits greater than 63% power added efficiency from 1.5 to 2.5 GHz (50% relative bandwidth), and 40.5-42 dBm saturated output powers. (c) 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 57:481-485, 2015