A Comparative Analysis of Doherty and Outphasing MMIC GaN Power Amplifiers for 5G Applications

A comparison between a fully integrated Doherty power amplifier (DPA) and outphasing power amplifier (OPA) for fifth Generation (5G) wireless communications is presented in this paper. Both amplifiers are integrated using pHEMT transistors from the OMMIC’s 100 nm GaN-on-Si technology (D01GH). After a theoretical analysis, the design and layout of both circuits are presented. The DPA uses an asymmetric configuration where the main amplifier is biased in class AB and the auxiliary amplifier is biased in class C, while the OPA uses two amplifiers biased in class B. In the comparative analysis, it has been observed that the OPA presents a better performance in terms of maximum power added efficiency (PAE), while the DPA provides higher linearity and efficiency at 7.5 dB output back-off (OBO). At a 1 dB compression point, the OPA exhibits an output power of 33 dBm with a maximum PAE of 58.3% compared to 44.2% for the DPA for an output power of 35 dBm, and at 7.5 dB OBO, the DPA achieves a PAE of 38.5%, while the OPA achieves 26.1%. The area has been optimized using absorbing adjacent component techniques, resulting in an area of 3.26 mm(2) for the DPA and 3.18 mm(2) for the OPA.