A new design approach of broadband RF power amplifier (PA) is introduced in this work with combination of large signal X-parameter and Real-Frequency Technique (RFT). A theoretical analysis of large signal X-parameter is revisited, and a simplification method is introduced to determine the optimum large signal impedances of a Gallium Nitride HEMT (GaN HEMT) device. With the optimum impedance extraction over the wide frequency range (0.3 to 2.0 GHz), a wideband matching network is constructed employing RFT and the final design is implemented with practical mixed-lumped elements. The prototype broadband RF PA demonstrates an output power of 40 dBm. The average drain efficiency of the PA is found to be more than 60%; while exhibiting acceptable flat gain performance (12±0.25 dB) over the frequency band of (0.3-2.0 GHz). The PA designed using the proposed approach yields in small form factor and relatively lower production cost over those of similar PAs designed with the classical methods. It is expected that the newly proposed design method will be utilized to construct power amplifiers for radio communications applications.

This paper presents on-wafer noise figure (NF) de-embedding method of differential low noise amplifier (LNA). The characterization of NF was set up and referred as multi-stage network. The Friis law was applied to improve from the noise contributions from the subsequent stages. The correlated differential NF is accurately obtained after de-embedding the noise contribution from the interconnections and external components. Details of equations and measurement procedure are reported in this work. A 2.4GHz differential LNA was tested to demonstrate the feasibility of measurement and showed precise NF compared with other methods. The result shows an NF of 0.57dB achieved using de-embedding method and 1.06dB obtained without the de-embedding method. This is an improvement of 0.49dB of NF measurement.