A 45 dBm balanced power amplifier module based on four fully integrated Doherty PA MMICs A scalable solution for cellular infrastructure active antenna systems

After providing an introduction to active antenna systems (AAS) for cellular infrastructure, this paper presents power amplifier (PA) modules based on a balanced configuration of 2-8 fully integrated Doherty MMIC PAs. To our knowledge for the first time, a module with four Doherty MMIC PAs in a balanced configuration has been fabricated and tested. For a 10 MHz wide LTE downlink signal at 751 MHz, average and peak output power levels were 37.8 dBm and 45.0 dBm, respectively, with ACPR ≤-48.5 dBc. Overall PAE was 34 %.