Intrinsically Mode Reconfigurable Load Modulation Balanced Amplifier Leveraging Transistor\u27s Analog-Digital Duality

The communication schemes have rapidly changed the face of the human means of communication. The evolution from one generation to another has triggered many challenges on the design methodologies of RF designers. As the evolution ensued, the spectrally efficient modulation schemes have resulted in the substantial rise of PAPR, the peak-to-average power ratio. To enable the efficient amplification of the high PAPR signals, this thesis explores the areas of Load modulated Balanced amplifiers that can be inherently reconfigured to achieve a better efficiency than the conventional RF power amplifiers that see a significant drop in the efficiency as the signal is backed-off from the maximum power level. In the communication environment, the load mismatch to the power amplifier does result in the degraded efficiency profile which is detrimental to the performance of the communication system. Hence, the power amplifier stage needs to be mismatch resilient. A three mode reconfigurable balanced power amplifier that can tolerate the mismatch due to the antenna array in massive MIMO is presented. The transistor\u27s analog-digital duality is exploited for deploying it as an amplifier and a switch in the designed amplifier stage to enable the reconfiguration between the respective modes of operation. In addition, the output matching topology is designed to be symmetric for the corresponding amplifier stages with an input branch-line quadrature coupler and a unique harmonic tuning methodology that is used to effectively achieve a higher order load modulation in one of the modes, HLMBA. The other two modes of the PA stage are mismatch resilient and their performance is also observed to be efficient with switch settings dedicated to offer mismatch resilience at varied terminations