ABSTRACT
The main motivation for the renewed interest in power amplifier (PA) technology comes from the technical challenges and the economics of modern digital communication systems. This chapter discusses the issues and appropriate techniques for modern PAs, focusing on integrated circuit (IC) implementations for wireless communication systems. It explores the reader with the general PA design approach. The chapter reviews the classical theory of PA design in the case of constant magnitude signals and points out the trade-offs for different classes of transistor operation. Next, the PA design problem from a unified, general point of view based on the internal PA signal harmonic content is revisited. This gives the reader a further insight into the PA design problem and high-level solution possibilities. The chapter is concerned with the important topic of efficiency in the presence of back-off and briefly mentions other important design considerations.
