Multi-Stage Gate Modulation of E-Band MMIC Power Amplifier for Efficiency Improvement

Paper i proceeding, 2022

This work studies an efficiency improvement method of a 4 stage 1W GaAs E-band PA using multistage gate modulation. Using a behavioral modeling technique, we use simulations to investigate efficiency enhancement for different gate drive scenarios having one, two, or all stages of the PA modulated. Assuming an ideal pre-distortion and testing with a 64-QAM modulation signal an improvement of average PAE from 7.2% to 10.3 % is achieved which corresponds to a reduction of average DC power consumption from 5.9W to 4W.