Low-Loss Matching Network Design for Band-Switchable Multi-Band Power Amplifier

Atsushi FUKUDA  Takayuki FURUTA  Hiroshi OKAZAKI  Shoichi NARAHASHI  Toshio NOJIMA 

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Electronics  Vol.E95-C  No.7  pp.1172-1181
Publication Date: 2012/07/01
Online ISSN: 1745-1353
Print ISSN: 0916-8516
Type of Manuscript: Special Section PAPER (Special Section on Recent Trends of Microwave Systems and Their Fundamental Technologies)
Category: 
Keyword: 
power amplifier,  reconfigurable,  matching network,  multi-band,  switch, 

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Summary: 
This paper presents a novel design scheme for a band-switchable multi-band power amplifier (BS-MPA). A key point of the design scheme is configuring multi-section reconfigurable matching networks (MR-MNs) optimally in terms of low loss matching in multiple frequency bands from 0.7 to 2.5 GHz. The MR-MN consists of several matching sections, each of which has a matching block connected to a transmission line via a switch. Power dissipation at an actual on-state switch results in the insertion loss of the MR-MN and depends on how the impedance is transformed by the MR-MN. The proposed design scheme appropriately transforms the impedance of a high power transistor to configure a low loss MR-MN. Numerical analyses show quantitative improvement in the loss using the proposed scheme. A 9-band 3-stage BS-MPA is newly designed following the proposed scheme and fabricated on a multi-layer low temperature co-fired ceramic substrate for compactness. The BS-MPA achieves a gain of over 30 dB, an output power of greater than 33 dBm and a power added efficiency of over 40% at the supply voltage of 4 V in each operating band.