A novel broadband power amplifier architecture for high efficiency and high linearity applications

A novel and simple architecture for improving efficiency, bandwidth and linearity at backed-off RF power is presented. It is accomplished by a distributed amplifier with proper turn on and off of the transistor devices via an RF detector. Neither RF power combiner/splitter, DSP nor envelope amplifier is utilized. A MMIC prototype was designed and fabricated using a GaAs HBT process to verify this efficient, linear and broadband PA architecture and it measured 3% EVM and 24–25% PAE at 19.6dBm from 2.3GHz to 2.7GHz using a 54Mbps 64QAM OFDM modulation signal.

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