Design of class-E power amplifier with nonlinear components by using extended impedance method

Abstract

It has been shown in the previous study that the class-E power amplifier (PA) circuit can be efficiently simulated and optimized in the frequency domain by modeling the whole circuit with the extended impedance method (EIM). This paper reports a breakthrough in the EIM based class-E PA design by taking the nonlinear components into consideration. In analysis, the effect of the two state-dependent nonlinear components in a practical MOSFET switch, i.e., the parasitic drain-to-source junction capacitance and the body diode, is turned into the time-dependent characteristics by carrying out the states-to-time mapping. Iterative computation is necessary for obtaining the steady-state waveforms in view of the nonlinear components. Yet, given the high efficiency of EIM, it is proved that the EIM based optimization runs much faster than the state-of-the-art numerical class-E PA optimization.