PAGE CONTENTS
Objectives
The objective of this activity is to design, manufacture and test an EM of a space-borne high efficiency power flexible (both dynamic and static) HPA stage in C-band.
The scope of the hardware development in this activity is limited to the HPA (final) stage only of an SSPA.
Challenges
At the beginning of the project a review was undertaken to determine the most appropriate architecture in order to realise the high efficiency, it was determined that the use of a Doherty arrangement would be the most suitable. The main lesson to come out of this project was the bandwidth limitations of the Doherty amplifier. To achieve broader bandwidths it may be worth investigating moving the Doherty combining circuitry to the Die reference rather than after the matching circuitry as highlighted in the literature survey. This is however very difficult to implement with chip and wire techniques at high power due to the low impedances required of the Doherty transformers. Another approach could be to implement this in MMIC at lower power and then combine several stages to achieve the power requirements.
Plan
The project split into five main tasks over a period of 17 months.
- TASK1: SURVEY AND PRELIMINARY DESIGN
- TASK2: LOAD-PULL AND MODEL VERIFICATION
- TASK3: DETAILED DESIGN AND TEST PLAN
- TASK4: MANUFACTURING AND AIT OF SSPA
- TASK5: OVERALL EVALUATION AND FUTURE WORK
Current Status
Airbus Defence and Space Limited, Portsmouth UK, has successfully completed an ARTES 5.1 funded development of a HPA (final) stage of an SSPA.
Companies
