Linearity Characterizations of Highly Efficient, Infrastructure GaN Doherty Power Amplifier for 5G Applications

This paper presents a comprehensive linearity characterization scheme of highly efficient, infrastructure Gallium-Ni-tride (GaN) Doherty power amplifiers (DPA) for 5G applications. Linearization of high-power infrastructure GaN power amplifiers can be quite challenging due to inherent memory effects (especially trapping related). This requires special validation procedures to be developed for evaluation of linearity of GaN PA under various dynamic and static (transient and dynamic traffic) power conditions. In this work, static and dynamic power waveforms, of Frequency Division Duplex (FDD) and Time Division Duplex (TDD) types are used to characterize the linearity of 300W peak power, asymmetric GaN PA operating at 2600MHz (for 5G applications), with linearized efficiency of 60% (at 8-dB output back-off).