Wideband Highly Efficient Extended Continuous Class-GF Power Amplifier Design Employing Modified Bagley-Polygon Four-Port Power Divider Architecture

A design of a broadband highly efficient power amplifier (PA) is presented in this letter. The novel design method proposed is to employ a modified Bagley-polygon four-port power divider (BPFPPD) architecture to fulfill wideband impedance matching of the PA and combine it with the load impedance space and source second harmonic manipulation space provided by the extended continuous class-GF (ECCGF) mode with a more flexible range to further improve the efficiency performance of the PA in broadband operation. To validate the presented design method, a wideband highly efficient PA operating from 0.5 to 3.7 GHz is designed and implemented through the use of commercially obtainable 10-W GaN HEMT devices. The measured results of the fabricated PA present 57%–71.4% drain efficiency (DE) and 8.9–11.8-dB gain with 38.9–41.8-dBm output power from the entire design bandwidth.