Compact broadband high‐efficiency power amplifier using terminated coupled line filter matching network

This article presents a compact broadband high‐efficiency power amplifier (PA) with a filtering structure. Unlike the cascaded filter behind the traditional PA, the proposed cascaded branch load coupling microstrip line structure is used to design the output matching network (OMN) of the PA. It plays the roles of impedance matching and filtering, which is called a filtering OMN, the overall size of the circuit will be reduced. Two coupled microstrip lines cascaded are used to extend the working bandwidth, and a microstrip line is loaded to the port of the coupled microstrip lines to ensure high selectivity and good out‐of‐band performance. For verification, a broadband high‐efficiency PA is designed and manufactured by using CGH40010F GaN HEMT. Measurements demonstrate that in the range from 1.2 to 3.6 GHz, the saturated output power is from 39.8 to 41.8 dBm, the drain efficiency (DE) with a 62%–73%, and the gain is between 9.9 and 11.7 dB.