A C-band GaN based linear power amplifier with 55.7% PAE

A C-band linear power amplifier is successfully developed with a one-chip 2 mm AlGaN/GaN high electron mobility transistors (HEMTs). Two kinds of matching circuits for the linear power amplifier are compared. Besides, stabilization methods for the amplifier are also discussed. At 5.4 GHz, the developed GaN HEMTs linear power amplifier delivers a 37.2 dBm (5.2 W) cw P1 dB output power with 9 dB linear gain and 55.7% maximum power-added efficiency (PAE) with a drain voltage of 25 V. To our best knowledge, the achieved PAE is the state-of-the-art result ever reported for 2 mm gate width single die GaN-based hybrid microwave integrated power amplifier at C-band.