TCAD simulation of microwave circuits: The Doherty amplifier

Power amplifiers (PAs) for next generation of communication systems are expected to operate at higher frequency and bandwidth to support the growing data rates. The Doherty Power Amplifier (DPA) is one of the most promising circuits for the development of high efficiency PAs: its inherent structure, exploiting two interacting active devices, requires a nonlinear mixed-mode TCAD analysis with multiple devices. In this work we present for the first time a complete TCAD simulation of a DPA, exploiting an improved version of our in-house Harmonic-Balance based drift-diffusion simulator for large-signal mixed-mode analysis. We thus demonstrate that TCAD simulations are mature to assist the design of complex stages requiring multi-device large-signal analysis.