N-way Digitally Driven Doherty Power Amplifier Design and Analysis for Ku band Applications

With an increasing interest in backwards compatibility for existing satellites and the emerging satellite markets, wireless transceivers at Ku band are increasing in popularity. This paper presents the design of a four-way digitally driven Doherty amplifier, aimed at applications in Ku-band. Single tone measurements indicate a maximum drain efficiency of 53.4% at a maximum of 19.2 dBm output power. The final output power can readily be adjusted by changing the biasing in each stage accordingly. The N-way Doherty power amplifier was tested with an 800 MHz bandwidth, 64 QAM test signal aimed for future communication signal standards. An analysis of this configuration has also been performed for 2-way, 3-way and 4-way architectures.