A Novel Approach for Doherty PA Design Using a Compact L-C Combiner

In this brief, a new combiner analysis method for the design of Doherty Power Amplifiers (DPA) is proposed. A compact L-C combiner is used to validate the proposed method through both simulation and realization of a two-stage DPA in a 130nm RF-SOI process. Using a 2.3GHz CW signal, the PA achieves a measured peak PAE of 51% at 32dBm output power under 3.4V supply voltage. From 2.1GHz to 2.5GHz, the PA shows an average output power and PAE higher than 26.9dBm and 39% respectively at -35dBc E-UTRA ACLR when using a 10MHz-50RB QPSK LTE uplink signal with memoryless DPD. At 2.3GHz, the PA achieves a linear Pout and PAE of 28.85dBm and 42.8% respectively.