A Highly Efficient Fully Integrated GaN Power Amplifier for 5-GHz WLAN 802.11ac Application

In this letter, a novel compact on-chip output matching network to achieve harmonic impedance matching is proposed. With the proposed matching network, a highly efficient GaN monolithic microwave circuit power amplifier (PA) is designed for 5-GHz wireless local area network 802.11ac application. The implemented PA achieves a maximum power-added efficiency (PAE) of 49.5%-61.3% over the frequency band from 4.9 to 5.9 GHz, with a saturated output power (Psat) of 34.6-36.1 dBm. When tested with 802.11ac VHT80 MCS9 (80 MHz, 256-quadratic -amplitude modulation) signal with 11.3-dB peak-to-average power ratio, the PA achieves an average output power of 23.7-26.3 dBm, with a PAE of 24.9%-30.9%, while meeting the standard error vector magnitude specification of -32 dB.