A High-Efficiency Continuous Class-F GaN MMIC Power Amplifier Using a Novel Harmonic Matching Network

In this letter, an
${S}$
-band high-efficiency continuous Class-F (CCF) GaN monolithic microwave integrated circuit (MMIC) power amplifier (PA) implemented in 0.25-
$\mu \text{m}$
GaN-on-Si technology is presented. A novel harmonic matching network (HMN) for CCF MMIC PA is proposed, which can achieve fundamental, second, and third impedance matching with low insertion losses. The proposed HMN is designed based on transmission lines (TLs), which can achieve precise optimum fundamental impedance matching, resulting in high efficiency and output power. The experimental results show that the maximum power-added efficiency (PAE) is 48%–58.7% and the saturated output power is 36.8–38.5 dBm in the range of 2.5–3.6 GHz.