A Doherty Power Amplifier With Extended High-Efficiency Range Using Three-Port Harmonic Injection Network

In this paper, a Doherty power amplifier (DPA) using a novel three-port harmonic injection network (HIN) to extend its high-efficiency range is proposed. With the help of a part of the three-port HIN, which is placed between the carrier and peaking branches, the optimal drain fundamental frequency termination for the carrier device at back-off and saturation can be realized simultaneously thus enhancing the efficiency at back-off significantly. Meanwhile, this three-port HIN can also realize second harmonic drain terminations for the carrier and peaking device with the quasi-open and quasi-short circuit at the current plane, respectively. Consequently, the saturated power ratio between peaking and carrier devices is increased, which further extends the back-off range of the asymmetric drain-biased DPA. For demonstration purposes, an extended high efficiency range DPA was designed and fabricated using commercially available GaN HEMT (Cree CGH 40010F) devices. Measured results for this novel idea gave drain efficiencies better than 62.5% at 9-9.5 dB back-off point from 1.60 to 1.95 GHz.