Design of high efficiency Ka-band harmonically tuned power amplifiers

Author

Nemati, Hossein Mashad ; Ferndahl, Mattias ; Angelov, Iltcho ; Fager, Christian ; Zirath, Herbert

Author_Institution

Dept. of Microtechnol. & Nanosci., Chalmers Univ. of Technol., Gothenburg

fYear

2009

fDate

18-22 Jan. 2009

Firstpage

264

Lastpage

267

Abstract

A harmonically tuned power amplifier (PA) design approach is presented to provide high efficiency performance at Ka-band using a GaAs mHEMT device technology. A single-stage monolithic-microwave integrated-circuit (MMIC) class-AB PA is designed and measured. The PA efficiency is optimized for a circuit topology which allows harmonic load impedance terminations up to the third harmonic. An output power of 14 dBm is measured with a small-signal gain of 14 dB and a maximum power-added-efficiency (PAE) of 43%. Good agreement between measurement and simulation results is observed which allows further investigations through harmonic load-pull simulations using the in-house large-signal model of the device. It is shown that the PAE can be further increased to 50% by more careful second and third harmonic load impedance terminations.

Keywords

III-V semiconductors; MMIC power amplifiers; gallium arsenide; high electron mobility transistors; power amplifiers; GaAs; circuit topology; harmonic load impedance; harmonic load-pull simulations; monolithic-microwave integrated-circuit; power amplifiers; power-added-efficiency; second harmonic load impedance; third harmonic load impedance; Circuit topology; Gallium arsenide; High power amplifiers; Impedance; Integrated circuit measurements; Integrated circuit technology; MMICs; Power generation; Power measurement; mHEMTs; Ka-band; mHEMT; power amplifier;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Radio and Wireless Symposium, 2009. RWS '09. IEEE

Conference_Location

San Diego, CA

Print_ISBN

978-1-4244-2698-0

Electronic_ISBN

978-1-4244-2699-7

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/RWS.2009.4957384

Filename

4957384