A Broadband Doherty Power Amplifier Based on Continuous-Mode Technology

In this paper, a novel broadband Doherty power amplifier based on the continuous-mode technique (C-DPA) is proposed. The amplifier is focused on manipulating harmonic components in a Doherty power amplifier (DPA) structure to achieve improved bandwidth and efficiency. In a conventional DPA, harmonic isolation is typically required between the two transistors to prevent them from modulating each other at harmonic frequencies. However, as presented in this paper, such isolation is not actually necessary. On the contrary, by allowing the two transistors to modulate each other at harmonic frequencies with the help of a properly designed postharmonic tuning network, a series of highly efficient DPA modes can be created over a continuous frequency band, leading to a broadband C-DPA. Based on the proposed method, an example of a C-DPA working from 1.65 to 2.75 GHz was designed. According to the measured results, the designed C-DPA exhibits a 52%-66% efficiency at a -6 dB power backoff and a power utilization factor higher than 1.08 over the 1.1-GHz band. In addition, when simulated by a 7.5-dB peak-to-average power ratio 20-MHz LTE signal, the example C-DPA exhibits an efficiency of 46%-62% while maintaining an adjacent channel power ratio below -45 dBc after linearization over the full 1.1-GHz band. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first proposed C-DPA and a state-of-the-art performance for broadband DPAs.