Performance enhancement of pulsed solid state power amplifier using Drain Modulation over Gate Modulation

An X-Band 100 W Gan Hemt Power Amplifier Using a Hybrid Switching Method for Fast Pulse Switching

“…In the past, the power available from individual solid-state devices has been limited when compared with vacuum tube devices. Recently, significant progress has been made on GaN high-electron-mobility transistors (HEMT) for highpower solid-state power amplifiers (SSPAs) [7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17]. Using pulse compression techniques, radar systems using SSPAs show similar performance to that of vacuum tubes [7].…”

“…Sharp pulse edges and narrow pulse width are required to increase radar range resolution. Previous studies have examined the effect of these parameters in pulse mode radar systems [12][13][14][15]. The work in [12] used the Class-AB pulse mode, which exhibited slow switching time via time sequential operation.…”

“…The work in [13] investigated the effect of pulse width on the drain current of GaN HEMT. The authors in [15] conducted a comparative study on various bias modulation methods for a pulse mode SSPA. As shown in [13] and [15], the output pulse characteristic is heavily affected by bias switching, and switching time increases with the output power level.…”

“…The authors in [15] conducted a comparative study on various bias modulation methods for a pulse mode SSPA. As shown in [13] and [15], the output pulse characteristic is heavily affected by bias switching, and switching time increases with the output power level. This is because the charging time of the capacitive elements present in the bias switching network increases with power.…”

“…In this method, a continuous wave (CW) signal is supplied to the input of an SSPA. For pulse modulation, the power supply is switched on and off by a bias switching driver (BSD) [7,13,15]. This method provides relatively simple implementation compared to input pulse modulation.…”