A GaAs power chip set for 3 V cellular communications

This paper presents a chip set operating at 3 V supply voltage for cellular communications at L-band. A high efficiency power amplifier with a high packing density is reported. It makes use of high power-added-efficiency of MESFET devices in saturated class AB, and harmonic enhancement for the matching circuits. This three stage MMIC amplifier delivers 27 dBm output power with 35 % of power added efficiency with 0 dBm input power. A power switch is also described which achieves a typical insertion loss in the (0.8 dB, 1.0 dB) range and performs 20 dB isolation between the Rx (Receive) and Tx (Transmit) chains. PML also proposes a power MESFET that achieves 33 dBm output power with 55 % drain efficiency and 6 dB associated gain at 1800 MHz