Design of Reconfigurable PA Based on Spoof Surface Plasmon Polaritons

A spoof surface plasmon (SSPP) structure is applied to the design of a radio frequency (RF) reconfigurable power amplifier (PA). An input matching network of a reconfigurable PA is designed by a SSPP structure, while an output matching network is formed by a reconfigurable matching structure. An analysis and discussion of the electromagnetic characteristics of the proposed SSPP structure is presented. Gradient algorithms are used in the ADS tool to further optimize the performance of the PA. According to the test results, the reconfigurable PA based on SSPP theory achieves 41.8 dBm output power (Pout) and 65.5% power added efficiency (PAE) at 1.5 GHz and 40.1 dBm Pout and 64.2% PAE at 2.4 GHz. This layout has a total size of 71.5 by 35 mm. Compared to previously published reconfigurable works, the PA designed in this work has a simpler structure and smaller size while maintaining high efficiency and output power. A digital pre‐distortion (DPD) is implemented to further verify the linearity of the SSPP‐based PA. With the DPD, the linearity of the SSPP PA was significantly improved.