High Efficiency Inverse Class-E Power Amplifiers for Pre-5G Application

An RF power amplifier is the key module of the wireless transmission systems, its performance determines the efficiency and quality of the entire transmission link. In this paper, an inverse class-E power amplifier (IEPA) is developed. An GaN HEMT power amplifier chip and a 3.4GHz transmission line structure are employed to design the IEPA. In order to deduce the optimal voltage, current waveform and the load-side network parameters, the 50% duty cycle signal is employed in the frequency domain simulation. The simulated results show that, under the ideal conditions, the drain efficiency can achieve 100%. The measured output power of the IEPA is 38.2dBm and the power-added efficiency is higher than 70%.