A novel broadband power amplifier architecture for high efficiency and high linearity applications

A novel and simple architecture for improving efficiency, bandwidth and linearity at backed-off RF power is presented. It is accomplished by a distributed amplifier with proper turn on and off of the transistor devices via an RF detector. Neither RF power combiner/splitter, DSP nor envelope amplifier is utilized. A MMIC prototype was designed and fabricated using a GaAs HBT process to verify this efficient, linear and broadband PA architecture and it measured 3% EVM and 24-25% PAE at 19.6 dBm from 2.3 GHz to 2.7 GHz using a 54 Mbps 64 QAM OFDM modulation signal.