Design and fabrication methodology for industrial broadband high power amplifiers

This study presents a design and fabrication methodology for industrial broadband high power amplifiers (HPAs). The proposed method considers design constraints for broadband HPAs and parasitic effects arising from the fabrication process. This method is based on power combining networks (PCNs) whose characteristics such as power handling constraints, insertion loss, and bandwidth depend on the employed structure. Another important set of challenges is the technical faults and parasitics that occur during the fabrication process such as inequalities among different paths of PCNs, active and passive inherent mismatches, and many uncertainties in the fabrication and integration of a complicated large system. As such, the authors introduce a model for estimating the effects of path inequalities using a Gaussian function. For validation of the proposed methodology, a 2-6 GHz, 50 dBm output power broadband HPA system, which satisfies IEC-61000-4-3 RF radiant immunity measurement, was designed and fabricated. Furthermore, the measurement results exhibit the power-added efficiency of 10-28% and 48-51 dBm output power in the frequency bandwidth 2-6 GHz, which verify the capability of the proposed method for reliable estimation of the fabrication parasitics.