A 20W Multi-Band Multi-Mode MMIC Power Amplifier for Base Station Applications

This paper presents the results obtained on a multi-band multi-mode MMIC power amplifier. The proposed two-stage circuit is based on the silicon LDMOS technology. Thanks to dedicated design techniques, it can cover the DCS, PCS and UMTS bands (ranging from 1.805 to 2.17GHz) and delivers more than 20W of output power, 30 dB of gain and 50% of power added efficiency. The multi-mode capability is demonstrated thanks to the linearity (-43dBc ACPR at 7.5dB back-off) and video bandwidth (180MHz) performance. When combined in a Doherty configuration with an incremental 40W MMIC in a dual path package, the resulted asymmetric MMIC (an industry first) can deliver an unprecedented MMIC efficiency of up to 44% at 8dB back-off.