Design of multioctave high‐efficiency power amplifier based on extended continuous Class‐B/J modes

Nonlinear acoustics allows for applications like tissue harmonic imaging in medicine and parametric arrays in underwater acoustics. Mainstream sonars transmit and receive signals at the same frequency and up to now energy transferred to higher harmonic frequencies has been mainly seen as a disturbance for target strength estimation, e.g., in fishery research. This paper investigates the feasibility of utilizing the part of the signal generated around the second harmonic frequency band by nonlinear propagation of sound in water. It presents the potential enhancements the second harmonic signal may provide for target imaging as well as multifrequency target recognition. It compares measurements of the pressure field radiated by commercial transducers in water at 121 and 200 kHz up to a range of 12 m with numerical simulations. The detected levels of higher harmonic signals agree with simulations of nonlinear wave propagation. This verifies the implementation of the simulator and allows a comparison of the beam characteristics at longer ranges when filtered around the fundamental or second harmonic frequencies. An example of pulse-echo imaging with spherical targets is also shown using signals at the fundamental and second harmonic frequencies where the second harmonic signal can detect one of the targets that the fundamental signal cannot. Using the active sonar equation to estimate the maximum range, simulations based on a simple model including ambient noise and volume reverberation confirm that with a source level of 228 dB and a detection threshold of 12 dB the fundamental signal at 200 kHz can detect a fish of target strength -36 dB to approximately 343 m while the detection range of the second harmonic signal is approximately 243 m. The combined use of the signal components in the second harmonic and fundamental frequency bands provides a high-resolution image at short range and a long-range imaging capability at a lower resolution as well as a multifrequency characterization of targets.

This paper presents the effects of defected ground structure (DGS) on different ground planes in RF power amplifiers (PAs). Two DGS patterns etched on the front and back planes of printed circuit board which are named Top-DGS and Bottom-DGS, and a thru microstrip line are manufactured and measured to compare the insert loss at the fundamental and second harmonic frequencies. In order to evaluate the effects of the Top-DGS, Bottom-DGS and without DGS on the PA, three 4W PA have been designed and measured. Measured results show that the PA with the Top-DGS can reject the second harmonic about 13dB at Pout 34.76dBm, and achieve better the output power (Pout) and power added efficiency (PAE) than the one without DGS; the one with the Bottom-DGS has the suppression of about 28dB for the second harmonic at Pout 34.21dBm, and has less the Pout and PAE for the decreased characteristic impedance (Z <inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">0</inf> ) of DGS pattern.

This paper presents the analysis and design of a high-efficiency broadband Class-EM power amplifier (PA). The inherent broadband characteristic of the Class-EM PA that turns out due to the resistive-reactive impedance terminations at the fundamental and second harmonic frequency is first investigated and then extended using double reactance compensation technique by incorporating a parallel resonator L P C P into the main circuit's load network. Designed using GaN HEMTs, the PAs deliver 23.7% (without L P C P ) and 60.4% (with L P C P ) fractional bandwidth, within which the PAE is larger than 60% and the output power is relatively constant.

This letter presents an approach to maximize the output power and efficiency of a Doherty power amplifier (PA). The conventional carrier PA having match, used in a symmetric Doherty PA, does not deliver the saturated high efficiency at the 6 dB back-off power but at the 5.5 dB back-off power due to the knee voltage effect. To solve the problem, the gate biases of the carrier and peaking PAs are adapted. The gate bias voltage of the carrier PA is optimized for a higher peak output power, delivering a 3 dB larger peak power at match. That of the peaking PA is also optimized to have the same peak power of the carrier PA. A Doherty PA with the concept is designed using a 45 W gallium nitride (GaN) high electron mobility transistors (HEMT) for the carrier and peaking cells at 1.94 GHz. The measured average output power, drain/power-added efficiencies and gain are 44.35 dBm, 60.5/57.2%, and 12.75 dB for a 10 MHz long term evolution (LTE) signal with a 6.5 dB peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR).

A broadband S-band high efficiency internally matched 240 W GaN high power amplifier (HPA) has been developed. To obtain wider operating bandwidth and higher efficiency HPA, an output matching network with shunt inductors and 2nd harmonic reflection open-stubs connected by transmission lines is employed. To verify this methodology, we fabricated an S-band HPA and the output power of 240 W and the power added efficiency of 54.4 % over from 2.6 to 3.4 GHz were achieved. To the authors' knowledge, this is one of the widest bandwidth performances among the ever-reported S-band GaN HPAs over 100 W output power.

This paper presents a highly efficient InGaP/GaAs HBT power amplifier (PA) implemented using a proposed high- Q single- and two-winding transformer. A single- and two-winding transformer is designed with a printed circuit board (PCB) to combine the output power with a reduced passive loss. Compared to a typical 1:2 two-winding transformer, an additional unit amplifier is connected at the mid-point of the secondary winding to construct a single-winding transformer without additional windings. An IMD3 cancellation technique using a single- and two-winding transformer is also proposed to obtain a high linear output power with high power-added efficiency (PAE) without additional design circuitry. The IMD3 components of the two input currents in the single- and two-winding transformer are 180° out-of-phase cancelling each other at output. The proposed PA is integrated with an InGaP/GaAs HBT process using a PCB transformer. The experimental results demonstrate that the PA achieves a saturated output power of 33.3 dBm, with a PAE of 61.3% at 0.91 GHz. The proposed PA is also tested with an orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) 64-quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) signal having a bandwidth of 10 MHz and peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) of 7.8 dB at 0.91 GHz to evaluate the improvement in linearity. The PA achieves an adjacent channel leakage ratio (ACLR) of -42 dBc up to an output power of 26.0 dBm with a PAE of 26.8% and current consumption of 297 mA.

In this paper, a novel concurrent Class B/J continuum mode is presented based on waveform shaping of current and voltage. The behavior characteristics and performances of power amplifiers (PAs) in concurrent dual-band mode are investigated in detail. According to the analysis of proposed concurrent mode, the optimal load impedances at fundamental, harmonic and intermodulation (IM) frequencies are related to the magnitude ratio of the two carriers. Comparing with concurrent Class-B mode, two parameters α, β can be configured independently in the proposed concurrent mode, which provides more freedom and flexibility for design without output power and drain efficiency degradation. In order to verify the proposed theory, a 1.9/2.35 GHz dual-band power amplifier based on proposed concurrent mode is designed, fabricated and measured. Experimental results show that when the PA is driven by two 10 MHz LTE signals concurrently with total 9.2 dB peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR), the total average power is 36.0 dBm with 40.6% drain efficiency, which indicates a good concurrent performance.

This article reports a two-stage differential structure power amplifier based on a 130 nm SiGe process operating at 77 GHz. By introducing a tunable capacitor for amplitude and phase balance at the center tap of the secondary coil of the traditional Marchand balun, the balun achieves amplitude imbalance less than 0.5 dB and phase imbalance less than 1 degree within the operating frequency range of 70-85 GHz, which enables the power amplifier to exhibit comparable output power over a wide operating frequency band. The power amplifier, based on a designed 3-bit digital analog convertor (DAC)-controlled base bias current source, exhibits small signal gain fluctuation of less than 5 dB and saturation output power fluctuation of less than 2 dB near the 80 GHz frequency point when the ambient temperature varies in the range of -40 °C to 125 °C. Benefiting from the aforementioned design, the tested single-path differential power amplifier exhibits a small signal gain exceeding 16 dB, a saturation output power exceeding 18 dBm, and a peak saturation output power of 19.1 dBm in the frequency band of 70-85 GHz.

Envelope tracking (ET) is a key technology improving efficiency of RF power amplifiers (PAs) and battery lifetime in mobile handsets. It has been commercialized since 4G LTE era, and is also being employed in 5G NR handsets. A supply modulator (SM) is a circuit generating power supplies of RF PAs for ET and average power tracking (APT) operations. Currently, the maximum channel BW and supported ET BW of 5G NR handset is 100MHz [1]–[4]. In a short time, over 100MHz BW will be necessary to support intra-band contiguous carrier aggregation cases of n77C/n78C/n79C in 3GPP standard [5]. The required instantaneous maximum output power of SM is about 10W which is calculated by the following parameters: 26dBm output power by power class 2 (PC2), 2dB loss of RF front-end module (FEM) due to complex operating band combinations (EN-DC for non-standalone mode, NE-DC, 2CA/3CA), 6dB higher instantaneous power due to peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) at 1 resource block (RB), 1dB margin, and poor PA efficiency of around 33% (worst example) due to high carrier frequency of 5GHz at n79 band. The poor PA efficiency can be relaxed by high voltage PA design beyond 5V. In [1], a supply modulator with boosted output larger than battery voltage $(V_{BAT})$ is proposed, and the designed PA with 30% higher voltage shows 10% higher efficiency and broader BW owing to low impedance transformation ratio from $50 \Omega$ and small parasitic output capacitance of power cell. The challenge is how to design a supply modulator for 5G NR that can achieve both wide ET BW and high output voltage/power capability, while satisfying high efficiency, low receiver-band noise, short transition time, and multi-mode/standard operation.

A novel design methodology for two stages microwave monolithic integrated circuit (MMIC) power amplifier (PA) is presented. The proposed solution allows to almost null the phase distortions (AM/PM) without worsening other key features of the PA, such as amplitude distortion (AM/AM) and efficiency. The derived approach is verified presenting the design and the experimental characterization of a two stages GaN MMIC PA for Microwave Backhaul radio links. The MMIC has been developed in a commercial 0.25 μm GaN power process, resulting in a 3×3 mm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> chip area. At 7 GHz, the realized module shows 6 W of saturated output power, 17 dB of gain, 63% of power added efficiency and less than 1.5 degree of phase distortion. Moreover, when tested with modulated signals (i.e., 256 QAM modulation scheme, 7 dB of PAPR), the PA shows a spectral regrow lower than -40 dBc at 32 dBm of average output power without any predistortion, while the average efficiency is around 30%.

This article presents the analysis and design of a three-stage load modulated power amplifier (PA), in which three amplifiers, each with different biasing, are connected to a four-port coupler. It is illustrated that, by properly configuring current relationships between the three amplifiers, this new load modulated PA can provide flexible output power back-off (OBO) and achieve high efficiency within a large OBO range. A detailed theoretical analysis and design methodology are given. In this architecture, the OBO level can be adjusted by simply setting bias conditions of the relevant amplifiers that correspond to the current relationships. Therefore, after circuit fabrication, the OBO range can still be reconfigured without redesigning the circuit. To validate the proposed approach, a prototype operating at 3.45 GHz is demonstrated and implemented with gallium nitride (GaN) transistors. The measured saturated output power reaches 45 dBm with 70.1% drain efficiency. At 6-/8-/10-dB OBO, the fabricated PA can provide up to 62.1%/53.8%/47.3% drain efficiency, respectively. When driven by a 60-MHz 9-dB peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) long-term evolution (LTE) signal, the PA provides 34-dBm average output power with 44.3% average efficiency. Moreover, measurement results prove that the PA can offer efficiency enhancement when the OBO is reconfigured to 8 or 12 dB after fabrication.

This paper presents a novel design approach of CMOS power amplifier (PA) using 50Ω matched coplanar waveguide component which improves the power efficiency for K-band applications. This new technique of designing PA also enhances the data transmission rate and achieves saturated output power in the desired frequency band. A two stage CMOS PA is designed in which coplanar waveguide line is used in order to provide broadband multi-section matching networks which could improve bandwidth, output power, power gain and power added efficiency (PAE). A two-stage CMOS PA design is simulated using predictive technology model (PTM) 65nm CMOS process in ADS.v.12. A simulation result of PA achieves a reflection parameter of −43.06dB at 23GHz with forward gain of 15.6dB over the frequency band of 20.5–24.5GHz. The best achievement of design is to achieve PAE of 58% using the concept of coplanar waveguide.

<?Pub Dtl=""?> Design equations and performance limits of Class-E power amplifiers at mm-waves, including the limitations imposed by active and passive devices in a given technology, are presented in this paper. A beyond nominal breakdown voltage Class-E design methodology for SiGe HBT power amplifiers is proposed to generate high output power while maintaining high Class-E efficiency. A mm-wave SiGe stacked Class-E architecture is also introduced to increase the overall voltage swing, with each series stacked device operating in the beyond nominal breakdown mode. The mm-wave beyond <formula formulatype="inline" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex Notation="TeX">$BV_{\rm CEO}$</tex></formula> operation of SiGe HBTs has been demonstrated experimentally in an integrated 45 GHz Class-E power amplifier fabricated in a 0.13 µm SiGe BiCMOS process with 20 dBm measured output power at 31.5% peak power-added efficiency (PAE). The series stacking of mm-wave Class-E power amplifier concept is also verified by fabricating double-stacked and triple-stacked SiGe HBT power amplifiers in 0.13 µm SiGe BiCMOS process which demonstrate a measured output power of 23.4 dBm at 41 GHz with peak PAE of 34.9%. High power, highly efficient, switching power amplifier unit cells presented in this paper can facilitate realization of efficient Watt-level mm-wave digital polar transmitters.

In this article, we propose a broadband fully integrated power amplifier (PA) using a waveform shaping harmonic matching network. A comprehensive theory is developed for the proposed multi-resonance harmonic matching network to derive design criteria for achieving wide bandwidth, low insertion loss, and optimum load impedances in the second- and third-harmonic frequency bands. Furthermore, it is shown that this network can be realized using a lower total inductance compared to a standard bandpass network which is an important feature in reducing chip area and fabrication cost. A fully integrated PA prototype is implemented using a 250-nm GaN-on-SiC process with 28-V supply. The PA provides 33.9&#x2013;36.1dBm output power (at 2&#x2013;3dB gain compression), 42&#x2013;51&#x0025; drain efficiency (DE), 38&#x2013;48&#x0025; power-added efficiency (PAE), and 10&#x2013;12.2dB power gain, across 4.0&#x2013;6.0GHz. The output-power 1-dB bandwidth is 3.6&#x2013;5.6GHz (44.5&#x0025;). For a 64-QAM signal with 8dB peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) at 5.0GHz, the PA can provide 30.2dBm average output power and 32&#x0025; average PAE with RMS error vector magnitude (EVM) of &#x2212;34.0/&#x2212;32.4/&#x2212;28.4dB (2.0/2.4/3.8&#x0025;) for 50/100/200MHz modulation bandwidth, without using digital predistortion (DPD). The maximum average output power and average PAE, under the linearity constraint EVM &#x003C;&#x2212;28dB, are respectively 32.1/32.0/30.2dBm and 39/38/32&#x0025;, for modulation bandwidth of 50/100/200 MHz.

In this work, a Doherty power amplifier is presented for IMT-Advanced system at 450–470MHz frequency band. An imperfect Quarter-wave transmission line, which consisted of two shunt capacitors and a series microstrip line, is adopted to replace the bulky impedance inverter quarter-wave transmission line for designing the Doherty power amplifier (PA). Both the traditional and proposed structures for the Doherty power amplifiers were implemented. Comparing with the traditional Doherty amplifier, the size of the circuit and the manufacturing costs are decreased obviously. The measurement results of the proposed Doherty PA exhibit good performance as well as the traditional Doherty power amplifier. For a input signal with a 7.8dB Peak to Average Power Ratio (PAPR), the measured drain efficiency of the proposed Doherty power amplifier is 48.5% at an average output power of 43.0 dBm, which is a 7.8dB backed — off the peak output power. Moreover, in order to improve the linearity of the proposed Doherty power amplifier, the augmented Hammerstein and polynomial predistorter are used to linearize the proposed Doherty power amplifier. After digital predistortion, the adjacent channel leakage ratio (ACLR) reaches −45.5dBc at an average output power of 43.0 dBm, which can satisfy the requirements of the IMT-Advanced systems.