A HIGHLY EFFICIENT CLASS-F POWER AMPLIFIER FOR WIDEBAND LINEAR POWER AMPLIFIER APPLICATIONS

Abstract

In this letter, a highly, efficient class-F power amplifier (PA) is developed as a new main block of tire wideband base-station linear power amplifier. The class-F PA is implemented using Eudyna EGN010MK GaN HEMT with a 10-W peak envelop power. The nonlinearity and memory effects of class-F PA are explored to apply the wideband application. The maximum power-added efficiency of the implemented PA is 68% at a saturated output power of 40 dBm for the 2.14-GHz CW signal. The PA delivers a good efficiency of 35% at an average output power of 32.3 dBm for wide-band code division multiple access 3FA signal with 15-MHz bandwidth, and the linearity can be improved to about -48 dBc using the digital feedback predistortion linearization technique. (C) 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 51: 2323-2326, 2009 Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/mop.24631