Efficiency Improvement for Diode-Clamped Linear Amplifier using Unequally Divided Voltage Power Supply

This paper proposes an efficiency improvement scheme for diode-clamped linear amplifier (DCLA) using unequally divided voltage power supply. The conventional DCLA is designed such that multiple power supplies applied to the circuit have equal input voltages. However, in the conventional DCLA, since the power supply voltages are all equal, the loss of elements operating in the linear region may be large. Therefore, in the proposed non-unequal power supply DCLA, losses in the linear operation of the MOSFET can be reduced and high efficiency can be expected by designing each power supply applied to the circuit to have unequal input voltage. In this paper, it is confirmed from the theoretical calculation that the efficiency of the 4-stage DCLA using unequally divided voltage power supply is improved by 1.7% compared to the conventional 4-stage DCLA. Also, it was confirmed that the efficiency was improved by 0.7% than the experimental verification.