The Doherty Power Amplifier: Review of Recent Solutions and Trends

Abstract

In this paper, an extensive review of the most up-to-date papers on microwave Doherty power amplifiers is presented. The main applications are discussed, together with the employed semiconductor technologies. The different research trends, all aimed to improve the advantages of the Doherty scheme and to solve its inherent drawbacks, are presented. The first considered topic is the maximization of efficiency and/or linearity, where analog and digital techniques are exploited. Another important trend is the bandwidth enlargement of the Doherty architecture, that involves a large number of papers. Multi-band, multi-mode solutions are also considered, using either fixed or reconfigurable solutions. The final section is dedicated to the most significant Doherty integrated implementations.