Unequal-cells-based GaNHEMT Doherty amplifier with an extended efficiency range

Abstract

This letter reports an extended GaN HEMT Doherty power amplifier (DPA). For high efficiency over a wide output power range, the DPA is designed using two cells with unequal saturation power (P-sat). A cell with lower P-sat is used as the carrier cell. For experimental validations, the carrier and peaking cells are designed and implemented with 25 W GaN HEMTs at wide-band code division multiple access (WCDMA) of 2.14 GHz, and then show the P-sat of 41.3 dBm and 43.6 dBm, respectively. For the proposed DPA, the single-tone results show the power-added efficiency (PAE) of 50% at an output power of 37.3 dBm (9 dB back-off power from P-sat). For a one-carrier WCDMA signal, the PAE of 47.9% with an adjacent channel leakage ratio of -35.8 dBc is obtained at 37.3 dBm, which is 7.9% improvement compared to the conventional DPA. The PAE of 40% is maintained over an 11.4 dB back-off power.