10W Power Amplifier Design for sub-6GHz 5G Band via Virtual Gain Optimization

In this study, a 10-W 3.4-3.8 GHz power amplifier is designed in the 5G n78 band, which is the allocation frequency of the European Union for the European area. CG2H40010F GaN RF transistor is used in the design. Firstly, by using the Advanced Design System (ADS), load/source pull impedances of the transistor are obtained. Then, a real frequency line-segment technique-based numerical procedure is used to assess the gain-bandwidth limitations (GBWL) of the given load/source impedance data. With the help of a software tool called “virtual gain optimization (VGO)”, input matching network (IMN) and output matching network (OMN) are obtained. Eventually, the power amplifier has 40.6±0.4 dBm output power, 13.6±0.4 dB gain, %69±1.5 power added efficiency (PAE) between 3.4 and 3.8 GHz.