Reliable RF power amplifier design based on a partitioning design approach

With the rapid development of 3G-LTE and 4G broadband wireless communications, advanced power amplifiers with complex architectures have to be adopted to compile with the rigorous radio specifications. However, in practice, first-pass success implementation of such complex modern highly linear and efficient RF power amplifiers is exceedingly challenging for circuit designers mainly owing to the significantly increased circuit complexity. Following the conventional design approach, experience-based iterative and costly post-fabrication tuning work has to be performed very frequently to obtain the desired power amplifier characteristics. A novel partitioning design concept has been developed to facilitate the first-pass success realization of complex RF circuits. It is able to effectively eliminate lengthy build-and-try final post-fabrication tuning, by verifying the fabricated sub-circuit performance already during the design stage. Demonstrator of a single-ended class-AB RF power amplifier designed with AlGaAs/GaAs HEMT technology has successfully demonstrated the feasibility of this insightful design methodology, which can efficiently achieve the straightforward reliable RF power amplifier design while minimizing the entire time-to-market.