A Study on AM-AM/PM Characteristics of a Single-Stage HBT Power Amplifier

Abstract

Since 2020, the service of the 5th generation (5G) mobile phone has been started. In order to increase the transmission speed in 5G mobile phones, the multi-level of the modulated signal is advanced, and for that, the power amplifier (PA) high linearity is required even at low output power. In accordance with this, the review of the linearization technology of a PA has become important. As a performance index of the distortion of the PA, the output power dependence of the gain and phase, the AM (Amplitude Modulation)-AM/PM (Phase Modulation) characteristic is well known. There has been a lot of consideration for the AM-AM/PM characteristics of PA. The AM-AM/PM characteristics are affected by both source and load impedances. In this paper, a single-stage HBT (Hetero-junction Bipolar Transistor) PA is described by a simple linear equivalent circuit with multiple parameter sets. Each parameter set is defined according to the PA output power level. With this simple model, we investigated the change of AM-AM/PM characteristics when the reactance parts of source and load impedances was changed. It has become clear that change in the AM-AM/PM characteristics of the PA when the parameters were changed was mainly due to the change in the AM-AM/PM characteristics at the base node.