A 11.2-17.5 GHz Continuous Class-F Power Amplifier with Balanced 8-Ways Harmonic Tuning Achieving 30.3dBm P_out and 32% PAE

This paper presents a $11.2-17.5 \mathrm{GHz}$ continuous Class-F power amplifier (PA). A prototype of three-stages cascaded PA with balanced 8 -ways combined harmonic tuning matching network in continuous Class-F is proposed. It realizes on-chip continuous harmonic-termination output network as well as 8ways power combining with low impedance imbalance in ultra-wideband for efficiency/output power boosting and harmonic suppression of the PA. Compact output network with low insertion loss is adopted. The core area of proposed PA is only $0.85 \times 0.75 \mathrm{~mm}^{2}$ in $0.13 \mu \mathrm{~m}$ CMOS SOI process. The results show that the PA achieves a maximum output power of $30.7 \mathrm{dBm}, 3-\mathrm{dB}$ bandwidth from 11.2-17.5GHz, peak power added efficiency (PAE) of 35.2%, $2^{\text {nd }}-/ 3^{\text {rd }}$-order harmonics suppression of $61.1 / 40.8 \mathrm{dBc}$ for 15 GHz fundamental frequency.