A New Practical Harmonics Tune for High Efficiency Power Amplifier

This paper describes a new practical harmonics tune (Tuned B), in which 2nd harmonic is open and 3rd harmonic is short, to realize higher efficiency power amplifiers. Analytic calculations of drain voltage and current waveforms as well as load line are often used for design of high efficiency power amplifiers. When considering up to 3rd order harmonic in these analyses, the Tuned B is more suitable than class F. Simulation results of nonlinear p-HEMT modeling indicated that the proposed Tuned B achieved higher efficiency than that of the class F in gain compression region. Breadboard evaluations using 0.5μm p-HEMT demonstrated 81.7% maxmum drain efficiency and a power added efficiency (PAE) of 67.5% with an output power (Po) of 30.5dBm at an adjacent channel leakage power (ACP) of -48dBc in Japanese personal digital cellular (PDC).