Design of Doherty Power Amplifier for Carrier-Aggregation in LTE-A Small Cell Base Station

Abstract

The demand for higher data rate has led to the utilization of carrier aggregation technique, where the linearity and efficiency requirements of power amplifier become more stringent especially for base station. To improve efficiency around the average output power, the two-way symmetrical Doherty power amplifier with unequal input power splitting ratio is proposed. The experimental results show that the proposed Doherty architecture delivers a 39 dBm average output power with low error vector magnitude and high efficiency. Finally, an example of two LTE-Advanced component carriers (CCs) at Band 41 is used to verify the feasibility of the proposed Doherty concept in intra-band carrier aggregation.