Experimental Validation of Class F Waveform Engineering in Class C Biasing Condition

In this paper the experimental verification of suitable input harmonic injection to achieve class F operating conditions in class C (under pinch-off) biased active devices is discussed. In detail, it is demonstrated that by generating a third harmonic component Vg,3 with a proper phase relationship with respect to the fundamental one Vg,1, it is possible to change the phase of the resulting output harmonic components, and in particular of the third one ID,3, thus generating the proper squaring of the output voltage. Experimental results at device level have shown an improvement in terms of output power and efficiency from 2.24W to 3.00W and from 72.2% to 79.3%, respectively. The proposed approach could play a key role in the maximization of the achievable efficiency of Doherty power amplifiers, where the auxiliary branch needs to be biased in class C for an exploitation of the architecture.