A 200 watt broadband continuous-mode doherty power amplifier for base-station applications

Abstract

This paper presents a high-power Continuous-mode Doherty Power Amplifier (C-DPA) for base-station applications. By utilizing de-embedded models of active devices and allowing the two transistors modulate each other at harmonic frequencies, the proposed C-DPA exhibits improved power, efficiency and bandwidth. Based on the proposed technique, a demonstrating 200 Watt C-DPA was designed over 1.7–2.7 GHz band. According to the measured results, over the 1 GHz bandwidth, the designed DPA generates 52.7–54.3 dBm power at saturation and exhibits 40%-50.2% drain efficiency at −6dB power back-off (BO). To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the state-of-the-art performance of high-power broadband DPAs for base-station applications. Furthermore, using a 10MHz, 7.5dB PAPR LTE signal, the fabricated DPA was measured and linearized over the full-band, verifying its ability of being linearized.