Parallel Plate Coupler Based Doherty Power Amplifier Design for 5G NR Handset Applications

Abstract

In this paper, new parallel plate coupler based Doherty power amplifier design for 5G NR handset applications is proposed. Based on simplified output network, the proposed Doherty power amplifier is analyzed. The proposed Doherty power amplifier is demonstrated experimentally with GaAs-HBT. A PAE of 42.0% and a NR ACLR of −38.8 dBc at an average output power of 27.8 dBm are measured at 3.75 GHz under 5G NR 100 MHz, DFT-s-OFDM, QPSK operation, and the efficiency improvement from Class AB operation achieves 11%. Moreover, the proposed Doherty power amplifier maintains more than 35.0% efficiency with a NR ACLR of below −35.2 dBc from 3.35 GHz to 4.15 GHz, corresponding to 5G NR Band n77.