Two Port Network Theory Based Design Method of Broadband Doherty Power Amplifier

Abstract

LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) is a widely used communication standard and it mainly features Carrier aggregation (CA). CA increases the user data rate and efficiently exploits the fragmented spectrum by combining various carrier frequencies. The intrinsic multi-band and multi-standard of CA, along with the existing high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR), brings the challenges of broadband requirement and back-off (BO) efficiency enhancement when designing radio frequency power amplifiers (PA). The above two challenges inspire research interest in designing of broadband Doherty power amplifiers (DPAs), which maintain the high efficiency at BO power level and perform constantly versus frequency. In this work, the continuous design space was discussed. Output combining and matching network (OCMN) and its impact on the impedances shown to the two transistors were analyzed based on two port network theory. ABCD parameters of matching networks was formulated to accommodate continuous class-B (class-J) operation to DPAs. Second harmonic was terminated to avoid clipping and efficiency degradation. By enlarging design space, the bandwidth was substantially expanded. The proposed design methodology allowed the adsorption of parasitics which was the one of the bandwidth limiting factor. To validate the proposed methodology, an 8 Watts DPA was simulated to operate from 3 GHz to 5 GHz using Cree Gallium nitride (GaN) High-electron-mobility transistors (HEMTs). And simulation results showed that the 6dB BO efficiency was above 40% and Peak-envelope-power (PEP) of 50% over the frequency range of 3GHz to 5GHz. The Doherty power amplifier prototype is fabricated on substrate of Rogers4003C and assembled in house. Continuous wave measurement showed that the PA could provide 8.2 - 10.6 dB gain in the frequency band of 2.7 to 4.3 GHz. The 6 dB back off efficiency was 40% to 43%. And at peak power, the drain efficiency reached 48% to 60%. 80 MHz inter-band modulated signal and 15MHz dual band signal measurement were carried out to investigate the linearizability. In the inter-band measurement, average power around 33dBm and average drain efficiency of 46% was obtained with PAPR of 6.4 dB. ACLR above 48.7 dBc after DPD verified the easiness of linearization for this PA. Dual band measurement using two carriers at 2.8 and 3.2 GHz showed even when the PAPR of two band were 7.6 and 8.0 dB separately, average power of 32.3 dBm power can still be extracted with average efficiency of 40.5%. ACLR of 49.5 and 46.7 dBc of those two bands were good endorsement of the capability of inter-band concurrent amplification.