Design of a High-Efficiency and High-Power Inverted Doherty Amplifier

In this paper, we present a design method for a compact inverted Doherty power amplifier (IDPA), which has high-efficiency and high-power characteristics. An optimum load matching network and an additional offset line, after the matching network of the carrier amplifier, dynamically modulate the load impedance according to the input power drive, while the conventional Doherty power amplifier uses a quarter-wave line to do it. The operational principles and design guide are provided. For experimental verification, a 50-W Doherty amplifier was designed for the pi/4 differential quadrature phase-shift keying application at the 860-MHz band. The measured performance of the IDPA was compared with that of the balanced class-AB amplifier with the same output matching network. At an output power of 50 W, the IDPA performs with 3.16 dB better adjacent channel power ratio (-28 versus -24.84 dBc) and 6.15% higher power-added efficiency (59.02 versus 52.87%) than the class-AB amplifier does.