Case Study: Cree Speeds Development Of High-Performance GaN Doherty Amplifiers By 70%

GaN has risen in a few short years from a promising RF power technology to a "must have" in amplifiers for defense applications, and is moving quickly into the wireless arena, currently the domain of silicon LDMOS devices. Cree has long concentrated on making GaN a viable alternative, and to achieve this must create new devices, faster, and at lower cost. The company uses AWR's Microwave Office design environment to bring many of these products to fruition, including all of its hybrid-based GaN power amplifiers. One of the most impressive of these is the CDPA21480 Doherty amplifier (the current power architecture of choice for base station transceivers) that delivers 480 W peak and 80 W average RF power for WCDMA applications in the 2110 to 2170 MHz UMTS band.