Resonance gate bias cascode class-E power amplifier in GaAs pHEMT technology

In this paper, switching behavioural of cascode transistor in class-E cascode structure is improved by resonance gate bias (RGB) technique. The proposed technique can be used to increase supply voltage of a cascode class-E power amplifier (PAs) in order to achieve high output power and efficiency. Output power of class-E PAs are limited due to drain-gate stress caused by the switching transient voltages. The RGB technique relaxes the supply voltage limitation due to breakdown voltage (V-BD) of the transistor. In addition, reactance compensation components technique is employed to achieve high-power and wide-band class-E PA. To show validity of the proposed RGB technique, two reliable 1-W high-voltage and high-efficiency class-E PAs are fabricated in a 0.25 m GaAs pseudomorphic high-electron mobility transistor technology. The 1.8GHz class-E PA achieves 52% power added efficiency (PAE) and 30.6 dBm output power. The designed 2-3GHz class-E PA has 45% PAE at output power of 30 dBm.