Design a wideband high‐efficiency continuous class‐GF power amplifier based on a source second harmonic manipulation architecture

Abstract

In this paper, a novel source second harmonic manipulation architecture achieving second harmonic control at device input is proposed to solve the issue of reduced operating efficiency of power amplifiers (PAs) caused by the input nonlinearity in continuous Class‐GF mode. The key to the proposed architecture lies in the use of a compact multibranch network to match the source second harmonics of the three design frequency points to the short‐circuit state, which can expand bandwidth while avoiding unexpected efficiency degradation. Considering the necessity of theoretical verification, a broadband continuous Class‐GF PA is designed, implemented, and assembled employing a commercially available 10‐W gallium nitride device. The measured results show that a fractional bandwidth of 100% across 1.1–3.3 GHz with a drain efficiency of 62.4%–72.5%, an output power of 40.1–42.2 dBm, and a gain of 10.1–12.2 dBm are achieved under saturated output power.