A novel design method of concurrent dual-band power amplifiers including impedance tuning at inter-band modulation frequencies

Abstract

A novel design method of concurrent dual-band power amplifiers (PAs) including impedance tuning at inter-band modulation (IM) frequencies is proposed in this paper. It's shown that the impedances exhibited to the transistor at IM frequencies can affect the performance of a concurrent PA significantly. Thus it is very essential to take IM impedances into account, which can be referred to as IM impedance manipulation, or IM tuning for short. An example concurrent dual-band 1.92.6GHz PA is designed using the proposed method and a conventional concurrent dual-band PA not considering IM tuning is also designed for the purpose of comparison. Designed with a 10-Watts GaN HEMT, the proposed PA exhibits about 11 Watts output power and higher than 72.8% drain efficiency when driven equally by concurrent CW stimulus. To our best knowledge, this is the state-of-the-art performance of concurrent dual-band PA, and it's the first reported concurrent PA with IM tuning.