Design Challenges of Broadband High-Power Load-Modulated Power Amplifiers

Designing high-power amplifiers has become an enormous challenge over the years. On the one hand, with such operation modes as multi-band and carrier aggregation, the required bandwidth has been continuously increasing. On the other hand, due to economic and environmental reasons, the average efficiency must be pushed to the highest limit, evidently, while keeping the PA linearizable. Recently, load-modulated power amplifiers have emerged as a preferred choice for wireless communication base stations. Indeed, these PAs demonstrate a set of design and operation characteristics that align well with the target goals, and numerous architectures have proliferated in published research and granted patents. This talk addresses the challenges associated with the design of broadband high-power PAs based on load-modulation technologies, focusing on those with the highest popularity: the Doherty and the LMBA.