Power amplifier design using nonlinear embedding: waveform engineering at the current generator plane

Waveform engineering techniques, which date back to 1950s, still represent one of the most appealing approaches for power amplifier designers, especially when high-efficiency operation is required. Nonlinear embedding is the unique design technique that allows one to perform the waveform engineering approach directly measuring the device behaviour at the transistor current generator plane. Therefore, one can start the design from the correct reference plane with a direct link to the power amplifier design theory. In this talk we will discuss several design examples based on nonlinear embedding, covering both HMIC and MMIC power amplifiers. Particularly, we will widely investigate high-efficiency classes of operation, that intrinsically require harmonic manipulation, thus demonstrating the effectiveness of the nonlinear embedding technique. Furthermore, attention will be paid to broadband power amplifier design and we will show how the impedance trajectory to be synthesized, at the fundamental and harmonics, can be simply retrieved by adopting the nonlinear-embedding technique.