Analytical and experimental study of LINC amplifier using unmatched Wilkinson combiners

This work presents an analytical and experimental study of LINC power amplifier where an unmatched Wilkinson combiner is used at the output of two class-B amplifiers. This combiner is called unmatched because of the elimination of the one hundred ohms resistor from its input. This resistor is used to guaranty a good impedance matching between the combiner and the amplifier outputs. An amount of reflection coefficient can be presented at the input of the combiner depending on the signals phase different of the two LINC branches which that may damage the linearity of the amplified signals. Our Analytical study in this paper presents equations for the power efficiency and the signal linearity showing that despite of reflection between the combiner and the amplifiers, very good efficiency and linearity will be obtained. An ADS simulation and experimental work of the LINC system is performed shows an excellent agreement with the analytical study.