BROADBAND GALLIUM NITRIDE BASED CLASS E RADIO FREQUENCY POWER AMPLIFIER

Abstract

The rapid growth of advanced wireless communication sets new areas for RF circuit designers. High efficiency, high linearity and wide bandwidth simultaneously are the essential requirements of all wireless communication standards. Due to the high-power consumption, power amplifier (PA) becomes the crucial component and maximizing the PA efficiency while reducing the power dissipation and also maintaining the expected delivered power becomes the challenging task. Moreover, in last few years increasing demand of front end RF component for extended bandwidth enhanced broadband PA design area. For achieving high efficiency, theoretical analysis and experimental verification of single ended switch mode Class-E PA using waveform engineering technique has been adopted. This work proposes a model based de-embedding approach for predicting extrinsic load impedances at package plane of device. At current generator plane of device, voltage and current waveforms corresponding to Class-E behaviour are maintained during the entire PA design. In order to validate the analysis, a single ended Class-E PA working at 3.6 GHz has been designed and fabricated. This thesis also discusses about extended bandwidth operation of Class-E PA. Such PA ensures the efficient operation over a large set of frequencies that can be adopted with upcoming wireless standard. Moreover, these PAs are very useful for software defined radio platform where broadband front-end is required to provide multi standard feature to radio. Therefore, the broadband Class-E PA is designed and simulated with 1 GHz bandwidth varying between 1.6 GHz to 2.6 GHz