Design and performance of sequential power amplifiers

Author

Lehmann, Thomas ; Knoechel, Reinhard

Author_Institution

Institute of Electrical and Information Engineering, Microwave Research Laboratory, University of Kiel, Kaiserstrasse 2, 24143, Germany

fYear

2008

fDate

15-20 June 2008

Firstpage

767

Lastpage

770

Abstract

This paper presents an analysis of a sequential power amplifier (SPA) in a transmitter with an FPGA-circuit at the input and a directional coupler at the output. The nonlinear combining characteristics of the output coupler are investigated. The coupling strength and the ratio of maximum power of peaking and main amplifier are discussed as design parameters. A switched coupler is examined as the combiner. Due to the sequential transmitter concept the back-off efficiency can be significantly increased. E.g. using conventional class-B amplifiers a 10 dB back-off efficiency of 38% can be achieved. The average power added efficiency of the whole transmitter may be improved by 30% compared to conventional amplifiers. Design tradeoffs, theoretical performance and measurement results of the proposed transmitters are presented.

Keywords

directional couplers; field programmable gate arrays; power amplifiers; sequential circuits; transmitters; FPGA circuit; class-B amplifiers; directional coupler; sequential power amplifiers; sequential transmitter; switched coupler; Coupling circuits; Directional couplers; Field programmable gate arrays; Linearity; Microwave amplifiers; Power amplifiers; Power generation; Radiofrequency amplifiers; Switches; Transmitters; Efficiency; rf power amplifiers; transmitter;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Microwave Symposium Digest, 2008 IEEE MTT-S International

Conference_Location

Atlanta, GA

ISSN

0149-645X

Print_ISBN

978-1-4244-1780-3

Electronic_ISBN

0149-645X

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/MWSYM.2008.4632945

Filename

4632945