A Ka-Band Doherty-Like Non-Load Modulated Power Amplifier

Journal article, 2025

This article describes a three-way power amplifier (PA) topology that achieves broadband power back-off (PBO) efficiency enhancement without using active load modulation on the Main PA or supply modulation. This allows the PA to avoid the classic trade-off between load modulation and bandwidth that is typical among Doherty PAs. Unlike Doherty PAs, the proposed PA has both its voltage and current drive profiles reach a maximum at PBO, which causes the impedance of the Main PA to be constant across the entire input drive. This is achieved with a novel parallel-series output matching network (OMN) that primarily utilizes coupled-line baluns. A prototype is fabricated in the GlobalFoundries 45 nm RFSOI and achieves a Pavg and PAEavg of 6.45–12.61 dBm and 5.9%–16.4% from 25 to 40 GHz, respectively. With a 200 MHz signal, Pavg and PAEavg are 5.58–11.1 dBm and 4.8%–13.3%, respectively.