Journal
| Title | A Monolithically Integrated Single-Input Load-Modulated Balanced Amplifier With Enhanced Efficiency at Power Back-Off Posted by Jefferson Hora |
| Authors | |
| Publication date | 2021/01/14 |
| Journal | IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits |
| Volume | 56 |
| Issue | 5 |
| Pages | 1553 - 1564 |
| Publisher | Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) |
| Abstract | In this article, the design of a power amplifier (PA) using a simple but effective architecture, namely, load-modulated balanced amplifier (LMBA), is presented. Using this architecture for PA design, it can achieve not only a relatively high saturated output power but also an excellent efficiency enhancement at the power back-off (PBO) region. To prove that the presented approach is feasible in practice, a PA is designed in a 1- μm gallium arsenide (GaAs) HBT process. Operating under a 5-V power supply, the PA can deliver more than 31-dBm saturated output power with 36% collector efficiency (CE) at 5 GHz. Moreover, it also achieves 1.2 and 1.23 times CE enhancement over an idealistic Class-B PA at 6- and 9-dB PBO levels, respectively. Finally, the designed PA supports 64-quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) with 80 Msys/s at 22-dBm average output power while still maintaining an error vector magnitude (EVM) and adjacent channel power ratio (ACPR) better than -29.5 dB and -29.4 dBc, respectively. |
| Index terms / Keywords | Doherty amplifier, gallium arsenide (GaAs) HBT, load-modulated balanced amplifier (LMBA), monolithic microwave integrated circuit (MMIC), power amplifier (PA), power back-off (PBO) capability. |
| DOI | 10.1109/JSSC.2020.3048715 |
| URL | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9324923 |