Design of broadband three-way sequential power amplifiers

In this paper, we report a fully analog three-way sequential power amplifiers (SPA) using 10W GaN HEMTs. The proposed three-way SPA delivers Psat of 39~40 dBm over 2.45-2.8 GHz covering a 15.4% fractional bandwidth. The three-way SPA includes a 2:1:1 multi-way splitter, a carrier amplifier, two peaking amplifiers, and a 7:1.5:1.5 combiner for power combining. The measured three-way SPA shows 41% to 44% drain efficiency (DE) at 31 dBm (9 dB backoff) output from 2.5 to 2.8 GHz under CW stimulus. To the best of the authors' knowledge, the proposed three-way SPA is the first time reported three-way SPA in literature.