A highly efficient fully integrated GaN power amplifier for 5-GHz WLAN 802.11ac application

• Main Authors: Liu, Bei, Mao, Mengda, Khanna, Devrishi, Choi, Pilsoon, Boon, Chirn Chye, Fitzgerald, Eugene A.
• Other Authors: School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: 2019
• Subjects: High Efficiency; Engineering::Electrical and electronic engineering; Monolithic Microwave Circuit
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/104483; http://hdl.handle.net/10220/50017
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

In this letter, a novel compact on-chip output matching network to achieve harmonic impedance matching is proposed. With the proposed matching network, a highly efficient GaN monolithic microwave circuit power amplifier (PA) is designed for 5-GHz wireless local area network 802.11ac application. The implemented PA achieves a maximum power-added efficiency (PAE) of 49.5%-61.3% over the frequency band from 4.9 to 5.9 GHz, with a saturated output power (Psat) of 34.6-36.1 dBm. When tested with 802.11ac VHT80 MCS9 (80 MHz, 256-quadratic -amplitude modulation) signal with 11.3-dB peak-to-average power ratio, the PA achieves an average output power of 23.7-26.3 dBm, with a PAE of 24.9%-30.9%, while meeting the standard error vector magnitude specification of -32 dB.