Improvement to Load-pull Technique for Design of Large-signal Amplifier in K band

Abstract

An improvement to the load-pull technique for a large-signal design of a transistor amplifier is proposed. On the contrary to the current load-pull technique – a small-signal pre-matching on the output of the transistor is applied which results in reduced demands on a maximum VSWR of the tuner. This minimizes the launcher radiation in the K band and reduce measurement uncertainty. The proposed method has been verified on a design of 22 GHz large-signal amplifier using a Excelics EPA018A-70 transistor.