Skyworks Solutions, Inc.
WIDEBAND TUNABLE HYBRID-BASED COMBINER FOR A DOHERTY POWER AMPLIFIER ARCHITECTURE

Abstract:

The disclosure relates to a wideband, tunable hybrid-based combiner for a Doherty power amplifier architecture. The architecture includes two parallel power amplifiers: a carrier amplifier and a peaking amplifier. The peaking amplifier modulates the load seen by the carrier amplifier, allowing the carrier amplifier to remain in high-efficiency, saturated operation even at back-off. This load modulation can be achieved using impedance matching networks having an impedance matched to a specific frequency. Typically, a multi-mode/multi-band power amplifier module that does not include a tunable impedance circuit as disclosed herein, several Doherty power amplifier modules (each of which uses two amplifiers) would be used to cover several bands, which may make implementation costly and/or impractical. Thus, the architectures described herein provide wideband amplification using a Doherty amplifier configuration.