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In this article, a method for design automation high-efficiency power amplifiers (PAs) based on an optimization-oriented is proposed. The advantages of using particle swarm optimization to design PAs in electronic design automatic tools are analyzed, and then, simulated annealing is combined to form simulated annealing particle swarm optimization (SA-PSO). In this article, the perfectly inelastic collision used in conventional PSO is replaced by the perfectly elastic collision to improve the searching ability through reducing kinetic energy consumption. A stepped fitness function is defined to avoid the performance pit at a single-frequency point, and the concept “missing and returning” is introduced to solve the nonconvergence problem in simulation. Based on the improved SA-PSO algorithm, a broadband 10 W and a triband 6-W PA are designed. The broadband 10-W PA achieves an average drain efficiency (DE) of 62.5% and an output power of 41.2 dBm in the 0.8–3-GHz frequency band, respectively; the triband 6-W PA achieves an average of 57.4%/47.9%/47.3% DE and 37.7-/38.3-/37.4 dBm output power in 3.35–3.55-/5.75–5.95-/7.65–7.95-GHz frequency bands, respectively, while the gains of most stopbands reach less than 0 dB. With digital predistortion technology, the adjacent channel power ratio (ACPR) can reach less than −45 dBc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A 0.4–2.3 GHz broadband power amplifier (PA) extended continuous class-F design technology is proposed in this paper. Traditional continuous class-F PA performs in high-efficiency only in one octave bandwidth. With the increasing development of wireless communication, the PA is in demand to cover the mainstream communication standards’ working frequencies from 0.4 GHz to 2.2 GHz. In order to achieve this objective, the bandwidths of class-F and continuous class-F PA are analysed and discussed by Fourier series. Also, two criteria, which could reduce the continuous class-F PA’s implementation complexity, are presented and explained to investigate the overlapping area of the transistor’s current and voltage waveforms. The proposed PA design technology is based on the continuous class-F design method and divides the bandwidth into two parts: the first part covers the bandwidth from 1.3 GHz to 2.3 GHz, where the impedances are designed by the continuous class-F method; the other part covers the bandwidth from 0.4 GHz to 1.3 GHz, where the impedance to guarantee PA to be in high-efficiency over this bandwidth is selected and controlled. The improved particle swarm optimisation is employed for realising the multi-impedances of output and input network. A PA based on a commercial 10 W GaN high electron mobility transistor is designed and fabricated to verify the proposed design method. The simulation and measurement results show that the proposed PA could deliver 40–76% power added efficiency and more than 11 dB power gain with more than 40 dBm output power over the bandwidth from 0.4–2.3 GHz. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this letter, a broadband linear and efficient power amplifier for base-stations in long-term evolution (LTE) applications is designed, fabricated, and experimentally verified, employing Cree's CGH40010F GaN HEMT. A novel method of baseband, fundamental and harmonic impedances control is used to provide high linearity and efficiency across a broad bandwidth. When producing a two-tone carrier-to-intermodulation ratio (C/I) of 30 dBc, the circuit has demonstrated a two-tone power added efficiency (PAE) between 45%–60% across the frequency range from 1.6 to 2.6 GHz while delivering 36.0–38.5 dBm average output power. For a single-carrier 20 MHz LTE signal with a peak-to-average ratio (PAR) of 6.5 dB, a measured high PAE of 40%–55% can be achieved at an average output power of 35.3–37.5 dBm with an adjacent channel leakage ratio (ACLR) of about -30 dBc from 1.6 to 2.6 GHz. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]