Design of a Broadband Continuous Class-F RF Power Amplifier for 5G Communication System

Bandwidth allocation of the 5G communication system for many countries has been announced. The existing LTE RF power amplifier (RFPA) is no longer suitable to operate in the 5G frequency range due to frequency incompatibility and therefore RFPA will not achieve high efficiency if it is still used. This paper presents the design of the continuous class-F RFPA in the frequency range from 3.3 - 4.3 GHz for next generation 5G communication system. The RFPA is designed using 10 W CGH40010F GaN HEMT Cree device. In this paper both input and output matching network is designed with Chebyshev low pass filter technique together with the load pull and source pull methodology. The simulation result of the designed RFPA shows that the efficiency of the RFPA is between 67.4% to 79.8% across the 1 GHz bandwidth. The gain of the RFPA is more than 10 dB for whole frequency band at maximum output power of 41.3 dBm.