A one octave, 20 w GaN chireix power amplifier

In this paper we present a wideband high power amplifier that achieves an output power of 20 W with a bandwidth greater than one octave in the L and S bands. Two 10 W Class AB PAs are implemented with GaN-HEMT devices and a low loaded Q matching network to achieve wideband performance. High PAE is achieved by combining outphased saturated power amplifiers in a broadband combiner. The impedance transforming Wilkinson combiner is designed to interface the system with a 50 ohm load. The L-S band (1.2 ~2.5 GHz) amplifier was simulated, fabricated and characterized. The fabricated HPA provides an average output power of 43dBm, an average gain of 15dB with an average PAE of >50%. The average efficiency for 7-dB back-off, typical of LTE waveforms was 33.1%.