Extend High Efficiency Range of Doherty Power Amplifier by Modifying Characteristic Impedance of Transmission Lines in Load Modulation Network

Abstract

A load modulation network with characteristic impedance-modified transmission lines (TLs) is presented in this paper to extend the efficiency range and bandwidth of the Doherty power amplifier (DPA). Characteristic impedance values for designing the proposed DPA with different high efficiency ranges are given and wideband performance can also be achieved. A DPA with 2.55-3.35 GHz bandwidth using commercial GaN transistors is designed and implemented to validate the proposed architecture. The fabricated DPA achieves a measured 9.2-10.4 dB gain and 44.3-45.4 dBm saturated power. 57.9-75.6% and 47.6-58.8 % drain efficiency is achieved at saturation and 8 dB output power back-off (OBO) within the designed bandwidth, respectively. When driven by a 5-carrier 100 MHz OFDM signal with 8 dB peak to average power ratio (PAPR), the proposed DPA achieves adjacent channel leakage ratio (ACLR) of better than -50 dBc after digital pre-distortion with average efficiency of 53.4%, 55.3% and 56.6% at 2.75, 2.95 and 3.15 GHz centre frequencies.