Empowering the Bandwidth of Continuous-Mode Symmetrical Doherty Amplifiers by Leveraging on Fuzzy Logic Techniques

Achieving a fractional bandwidth (FBW) of more than 60% has been a challenging problem for two-way symmetrical Doherty power amplifiers (TW-SDPAs) that are designed using a continuous-mode technique. As reported in the literature, these designed continuous-mode-based TW-SDPAs possess less than 52% FBW, which cannot satisfactorily meet the challenging, complex, and ever-evolving modulation schemes' demands. To overcome such a limitation, this article proposes a novel approach based on fuzzy logic techniques able to simplify and speed up the design of continuous-mode-based TW-SDPAs with the state-of-the-art FBW. In particular, the proposed technique uses the K -means unsupervised learning clustering algorithm and the continuous-mode technique in a modeled fuzzy logic system environment. As a result, extensive impedance solution design space is readily made available and the optimal impedances required by the carrier and peaking subamplifiers for efficiently operating at the saturation and output-power-back-off (OPBO) levels are automatically obtained. For verification, a TW-SDPA was designed and measured. According to the measured results, the TW-SDPA operates within the 1.2-2.4-GHz frequency band corresponding to 66.7% FBW. As compared with the designed continuous-mode-based TW-SDPAs reported in the literature, this article indicates over 15% increment in FBW. Moreover, 41.59%-81.1% drain efficiency (DE) at saturation, 35%-63% DE at 6-dB OPBO, 42-45-dBm output power, and 7-10.52-dB gain were successfully achieved. Adjacent channel leakage ratio (ACLR) better than -46 dBc and average DE within 46%-55% were successfully recorded after linearization.