Broadband Power Amplifier for Cellular Base Station Application

Broadband Power Amplifier for Cellular Base Station Application

The growing demand for higher data rates and a broader bandwidth in modern cellular communication systems continues to push researchers to build a new system that can meet the communication requirements and contributes significantly to the field of high efficiency and wideband power amplifiers. The base-station transceivers require power amplifiers with increasingly high efficiency, low operational cost and wider bandwidth. The challenges of meeting all these requirements simultaneously motivated the design, simulation and evaluation of a Power Amplifier (PA) for base-station application. Advanced Design System (ADS) software was used to simulate broadband PA based on the ATF13786 Gallium Arsenide (GaAs) transistor, across the 850 MHz to 3GHz frequency range. The simulated small and large signal results of the PA revealed a saturated output power of 25.19dBm with a 1-dB compression point at 26.425 dBm output power level, a Power Added Efficiency (PAE) of 32.41 percent and maximum gain of 9.5 dB. The input return loss S11 and output return loss S22 are both less than 10 dB over the whole functioning frequency ranges. The minimal values of the computed and simulated Rollett and Bodway stability factors were 1.1751 and 0.092, respectively. However, the simulated PA is unconditionally stable within a fraction of the proposed frequency band; that is 850MHz 1.7GHz. Given the wide frequency range, the simulated results show that the input and output matching networks perform well over the operating frequency range. The results of simulated BPA compared favorably with those of available designs and their results meet the operational requirements

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