Wideband Active Load–Pull by Device Output Match Compensation Using a Vector Network Analyzer

This work investigates wideband active load–pull (WALP) on microwave electron devices with a standard vector network analyzer (VNA), solely using calibrated frequency-domain relative measurements. Differently from the methods requiring full time-domain waveform acquisition capabilities, this approach removes any instantaneous bandwidth (BW) requirement, allowing to target modulated signals with arbitrarily large BWs. A VNA-based measurement setup is presented, and a novel mathematical framework is developed in order to enable the synthesis of an arbitrary wideband load profile using suitable numerical algorithms. A linear precompensation of the LS output match of the device, here implemented by different methods, is shown to significantly improve the speed and the stability of the basic secants’ iterative method used to reach the target. Performance results, investigating the convergence properties of the approach and the effects of the setup dynamic range, are reported for a gallium nitride (GaN) high-electron-mobility transistor (HEMT) for up to 120-MHz output BW in the sub-6-GHz range.