LOW-POWER RF PREDISTORTION FOR BROADBAND MM-WAVE POWER AMPLIFIERS

Abstract

The 5G standard is expected to impose several tough challenges on RF transceivers due to its high 28-GHz carrier frequency, extremely large 1-GHz channel bandwidth, and multicarrier modulation scheme with high PAPR. This is particularly important for the PA because the required linearity and bandwidth force a huge power consumption and very low efficiency, and most linearization and efficiency enhancement techniques are difficult to utilize within these constraints. This work presents two ideas utilizing the predistortion principle to linearize a broadband millimeter wave PA. Simulation results of two variants of the first idea show a 4.2 dB linearity enhancement to the PA at the worst corner and an insertion loss of 7.25 dB in the first variant, or a 2 dB enhancement with an insertion loss of 2.9 dB in the second variant. The second idea achieves a linearity improvement of 3.5 dB at the worst corner with an insertion loss of 2.1 dB.