Multiband Doherty RF power amplifier

13 September 2011

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In era of exploding energy consumption and thus equipment operating cost as well as the parallel environmental need to reduce the carbon footprint, energy efficient mobile radio is a very important issue and future challenge. Additionally, increased number of standards, frequency bands and applications require flexible and sustainable solutions. On both fields the power amplifier constitutes one of the setscrews to be addressed. On the one hand, the power amplifiers cause up to 60 % of the power dissipation of a base station, on the other hand it constitutes a bottleneck concerning transmit bandwidth. The following paper presents a very promising concept of a highly efficient Doherty which supports multiband capability in order to enable future efficient, flexible and sustainable mobile radio applications. The basic functionality of the proposed concept is verified by simulation and promising simulated results, based on AlGaN/GaN-HEMTs from FhG-IAF (Fraunhofer Freiburg) indicate the benefits of the new concept compared to conventional Class-AB and Doherty amplifiers.