A 45% Drain Efficiency, -50dBc ACLR GaN HEMT Class-E Amplifier with DPD for W-CDMA Base Station

A 10W GaN HEMT class-E amplifier for W-CDMA base station is demonstrated in this paper. We first demonstrate that a low pass type class-E circuit has quite similar performance to widely used series L-C resonance class-E circuit by simulating voltage and current waveforms with 50V operation GaN HEMT at 2.1GHz. We achieved measurement results; drain efficiency of 82%, CW output power of 11W and linear gain of 19.5dB at 2.1GHz and 50V drain bias operation with a simple low pass class-E circuit. And ACLR of -50dBc was obtained with 45% drain efficiency under 2-carrier W-CDMA , 7.8dB PAR (0.01%) signals, by using digital pre-distortion (DPD) operation