A High-Efficiency Continuous Class-F GaN MMIC Power Amplifier Using a Novel Harmonic Matching Network
Xin Jiang, Wei Huang, Chunyue Bao, Xiuhao Wu, Wei Ke, Xinyu Liu, Weijun Luo
Abstract
In this letter, an <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${S}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> -band high-efficiency continuous Class-F (CCF) GaN monolithic microwave integrated circuit (MMIC) power amplifier (PA) implemented in 0.25- <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mu \text{m}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> GaN-on-Si technology is presented. A novel harmonic matching network (HMN) for CCF MMIC PA is proposed, which can achieve fundamental, second, and third impedance matching with low insertion losses. The proposed HMN is designed based on transmission lines (TLs), which can achieve precise optimum fundamental impedance matching, resulting in high efficiency and output power. The experimental results show that the maximum power-added efficiency (PAE) is 48%–58.7% and the saturated output power is 36.8–38.5 dBm in the range of 2.5–3.6 GHz.