TR2018-073

A High Efficiency 3.6-4.0 GHz Envelope-Tracking Power Amplifier Using GaN Soft-Switching Buck-Converter

    •  Komatsuzaki, Y., Lanfranco, S., Komlonen, T., Piirainen, O., Tanskanen, J., Sakata, S., Ma, R., Shinjo, S., Yamanaka, K., Asbeck, P., "A High Efficiency 3.6-4.0 GHz Envelope-Tracking Power Amplifier Using GaN Soft-Switching Buck-Converter", IEEE International Microwave Symposium (IMS), DOI: 10.1109/​MWSYM.2018.8439225, June 2018, pp. 465-468.
      BibTeX TR2018-073 PDF
      • @inproceedings{Komatsuzaki2018jun,
      • author = {Komatsuzaki, Yuji and Lanfranco, Sandro and Komlonen, Tapio and Piirainen, Olli and Tanskanen, Jarno and Sakata, Shuichi and Ma, Rui and Shinjo, Shintaro and Yamanaka, Koji and Asbeck, Peter},
      • title = {A High Efficiency 3.6-4.0 GHz Envelope-Tracking Power Amplifier Using GaN Soft-Switching Buck-Converter},
      • booktitle = {IEEE International Microwave Symposium (IMS)},
      • year = 2018,
      • pages = {465--468},
      • month = jun,
      • doi = {10.1109/MWSYM.2018.8439225},
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2018-073}
      • }
  • Research Areas:

    Communications, Signal Processing

Abstract:

We report a high efficiency sub-6GHz wideband Envelope-Tracking Power Amplifier (ET-PA) including a softswitching buck-converter and a wideband RF-PA, used in conjunction with a digital front end (DFE) environment for signal generation and predistortion. Both buck-converter and RF-PA were fabricated using an 0.15um GaN HEMT process. The DFE can generate the input signals for both buck-converter and RFPA, capture the output signal for feed-back and perform digital predistortion (DPD). The overall ET-PA achieves total efficiency of 39.5-46.7% and output power of 31.2-31.5dBm over 3.6- 4.0GHz with 20MHz LTE signals. With DPD, ACLR was below -45dBc with total efficiency reaching 47% at 3.6GHz. This, to the best of the authors' knowledge, is the highest efficiency yet reported for an ET-PA at this carrier frequency.