A Ka-band asymmetrical stacked-FET MMIC Doherty power amplifier

Abstract

We present a stacked-FET monolithic millimeter-wave (mmW) integrated circuit Doherty power amplifier (DPA). The DPA employs a novel asymmetrical stack gate bias to achieve high power and high efficiency at 6-dB power back-off (PBO). The circuit is fabricated in a 0.15-µm enhancement mode (E-mode) Gallium Arsenide (GaAs) process. Experimental results demonstrate output power at 1-dB gain compression (P1dB) of 28.2 dBm, peak power added efficiency (PAE) of 37% and PAE at 6-dB PBO of 27% at 28 GHz. Measured small signal gain is 15 dB while the 3-dB bandwidth covers from 25.5 to 29.5 GHz. Using digital predistortion (DPD) with a 20 MHz 64 QAM modulated signal, an adjacent channel power ratio (ACPR) of −46 dBc has been observed.