DESIGN OF CLASS-E RADIO FREQUENCY POWER AMPLIFIER
Power amplifiers (PA) are typically the most power-consuming building blocks of RF transceivers. Therefore, the design of a high-efficiency radio frequency power amplifier is the most obvious solution to overcoming the battery lifetime limitation in the portable communication systems. A power amplifier�s classes (A, AB, B, C, F, E, etc), and design techniques (Load-pull and large-signal S-parameters techniques) are presented. The design accuracy of class-A power amplifier based on the small-signal S-parameters was investigated, where compression in the power gain was used as an indicator for design accuracy. The effect of drain voltage variation on the power gain compression has been studied in this research.
The class-E amplifier has a maximum theoretical efficiency of 100%. It consists of a single transistor that is driven as a switch and a passive load network. The passive load network is designed to minimize drain (collector) voltage and current waveforms overlapping, which minimize the output power dissipation. Two L-band class-E amplifiers are implemented in section 5.3. One of them is a lumped elements based circuit and the other is a transmission lines based circuit. Both circuits show good performance (60% PAD) over a wide bandwidth (1.0 GHz). In section 5.4, lumped elements and transmission lines based X-band class-E amplifiers are presented. Both circuits show good performance (62% PAD) over wide bandwidth (4.8 GHz).
http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/theses/available/etd-07152001-172453/