Design of high efficiency Ka-band harmonically tuned power amplifiers

  • Authors:

  • Hossein Mashad Nemati;Mattias Femdahl;Iltcho Angelov;Christian Fager;Herbert Zirath

  • Affiliations:

  • Microwave Electronics Laboratory, Department of Microtechnology and Nanoscience, Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden;Microwave Electronics Laboratory, Department of Microtechnology and Nanoscience, Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden;Microwave Electronics Laboratory, Department of Microtechnology and Nanoscience, Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden;Microwave Electronics Laboratory, Department of Microtechnology and Nanoscience, Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden;Microwave Electronics Laboratory, Department of Microtechnology and Nanoscience, Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden

  • Venue:
  • RWS'09 Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Radio and wireless symposium
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

A harmonically tuned power amplifier (PA) design approach is presented to provide high efficiency performance at Ka-band using a GaAs mHEMT device technology. A single-stage monolithic-microwave integrated-circuit (MMIC) class-AB PA is designed and measured. The PA efficiency is optimized for a circuit topology which allows harmonic load impedance terminations up to the third harmonic. An output power of 14 dBm is measured with a small-signal gain of 14 dB and a maximum power-added-efficiency (PAE) of 43%. Good agreement between measurement and simulation results is observed which allows further investigations through harmonic load-pull simulations using the in-house large-signal model of the device. It is shown that the PAE can be further increased to 50% by more careful second and third harmonic load impedance terminations.