A microwave Doherty amplifier employing envelope tracking technique for high efficiency and linearity

In this letter, we demonstrate a microwave Doherty amplifier employing an input signal envelope tracking technique. In the amplifier, the gate bias of the peaking amplifier is controlled according to the magnitude of the envelope. A 2.14-GHz Doherty amplifier is implemented using 4-W PEP LDMOSFETs, and an adaptive controlled gate bias circuit is constructed and the control shape is optimized experimentally. The performance of the microwave Doherty amplifier is compared with that of a class AB amplifier using one-tone, two-tone, and forward-link wideband code-division multiple access (WCDMA) signals. For a forward-link WCDMA signal, the measured power added efficiency (PAE) of the microwave Doherty amplifier is 39.4% at -30 dBc adjacent channel leakage ratio (ACLR), while that of the comparable class AB amplifier is 24.2% at the same ACLR level.