Broadband Switch-Mode Radio Frequency Power Amplifiers using Tunable Components

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The most critical part of the mobile base stations, in terms of power, bandwidth, efficiency and cooling, is the PA. The advent of the new communication standards, such as WCDMA and LTE with high back-off power levels, has further aggravated these issues. The poor peak and back-off efficiencies of the PA can affect the size of the required cooling system and life expectancy of the transmitter. On the other hand, the poor bandwidth can result in multiple PA requirements for multi-application coverage. Therefore, highly efficient wideband linear PAs are essential to achieve small, reliable, and low cost transmitters. Until now, these requirements could not be achieved simultaneously by conventional methods, such as linear class-A, class-AB, class-J and harmonically tuned PAs.In the proposal, the re-configurability of the PA, using controllable matching networks is the focus point of the investigation. The aim of this extension is to improve the achieved results of the first phase of the project, in terms of bandwidth, output power and linearity. In this case, the design of high performance broadband switch-mode PAs at various backoff power levels, through output matching network and gate voltage optimizations, will be studied. Further, high performance nonlinear devices (e.g. varactors) and switches (e.g. pin diodes), applicable for high frequencies and high Pout will be investigated. Finally, the realization of the optimized matching networks based on these nonlinear components will be performed.