High-Efficiency Watt-Level E-band GaN Power Amplifier with a Compact Low-loss Combiner

Abstract

This paper presents a 3-stage E-band (71–83 GHz) power amplifier (PA) that employs a compact low-loss distributed matching network (DMN), which performs both the output matching and power combining. As a result of this, the measured PA achieves an output power of 30.4 dBm ± 0.9 dB (1.12 W ± 0.23 W) across the band. The PA achieves a peak output power of 1.35 W with a power-added efficiency (PAE) of 20.8% and a power gain of 16.3 dB at 78 GHz. The associated power density is 1.87 W/mm. When biased with 10V supply voltage, a peak PAE of 25% is reached. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the peak PAE with the power gain and associated power density are the highest values reported in GaN technologies at E-band.