High Current - High Speed Dynamic Bias Control System Applied to a 100W Wideband Push-Pull Amplifier

This paper presents a dynamic bias control system applied to a high power wideband amplifier. The amplifier used is based on a push-pull topology with LDMOS transistors and works in the 50-500 MHz frequency bandwidth. It delivers a nominal 100 W output power with 60% power-added efficiency (PAE) when it is fed with continuous signals. When it is driven by a 16QAM modulated signal, 6 dB input power back-off is necessary to keep an error vector measurement below 5%. This usual back-off technique results in lower PAE (43% in our case). By implementing the proposed bias control system, both 55% PAE and 5% EVM have been reached for 75 W average output power. The drain bias control circuit handles high currents and high voltages (7 A-28 V). The proposed implementation makes use of a class S modulator driven by a SigmaDelta modulator. Up to 1 Mbit/s envelope bit rate can be efficiently and accurately processed by using here dedicated circuits running at 20 MHz clock frequency.