Partitioning Design Approach for the Reliable Design of Highly Efficient RF Power Amplifiers

The modern wireless communication systems require modulated signals with wide modulation bandwidth. This, in turns, requires signals with very high dynamic range and peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR). This means that the amplifier in the base-station has to work at a power back-off as large as the dynamic range of the signal, so that the amplifier has a high linearity in this region. For the standard single-stage amplifiers, this large power back-off reduces the efficiency dramatically. In this work, a three-way Doherty power amplifier (DPA) aiming at high power efficiency within a dynamic range of 9.5 dB, is designed and fabricated using partitioning design approach. The partitioning design approach decomposes a complex design task into small-sized, well-controllable, and verifiable subcircuits. This advanced straight forward method has shown very promising results. Using this design approach, a three-way DPA has been designed to demonstrate the advantages of this reliable design technique as well. Based on the design of a single-stage power amplifier and proposing a novel output power combiner, a 6 W three-way DPA has been designed which allows the mandatory load modulation principle in three-way DPA structures to be realized with simpler elements, whereas the design of a standard Doherty combiner would have been very challenging and not practical due to the extremely small value of its characteristic line impedance. The proposed combiner is calculated for a three-way DPA with 2-mm AlGaN/GaN-HEMTs. The simulation result shows a very good load modulation for the amplifier, which confirms the theoretical expectation for a three-way DPA. The efficiency of the designed 6 W three-way DPA at large back-off shows very promising values compared to recently reported amplifiers. The measured IMD3 products confirm the good linearity of the amplifier as well. Accordingly, the proposed power combiner and the design strategy are recommended to be used as the preferred option for designing three-way DPA structures with very high output power. von Lehna, Roshanak