Wideband High-Efficiency Power Amplifier Using D/CRLH Bandpass Filtering Matching Topology

A wideband and high-efficiency power amplifier (PA) based on a bandpass filtering (BPF) matching network is presented. Composite right-/left-handed (CRLH) cell and dual-CRLH (D-CRLH) cell are employed to realize the wideband BPF matching network with an absorbed bias circuit. The equivalent circuit model of the proposed BPF matching network is given and a synthesized design method is introduced. Furthermore, one wideband gallium nitride (GaN) PA with high efficiency is achieved by using the proposed BPF matching network accordingly. The measured S-parameters of the wideband PA reveal bandpass response from 1.2 to 2.3 GHz with ±1.2-dB gain flatness and one transmission zero (TZ). For large signal performance from 1.25 to 2.4 GHz, the experimental results show that the measured drain efficiency (DE) is between 64.3% and 77.5%, and verifying the validity of the design strategies for the proposed wideband high-efficiency PA. Due to the compact feature of the CRLH and D-CRLH (D/CRLH) matching network, the proposed PA achieves the smallest area in terms of core circuit compared with other published works. The results demonstrate the advantages of the D/CRLH BPF structure for designing wideband high-efficiency PAs.