Band-Limited Volterra Series-Based Digital Predistortion for Wideband RF Power Amplifiers

Abstract

The continuously increasing demand for wide bandwidth creates great difficulties in employing digital predistortion (DPD) for radio frequency (RF) power amplifiers (PAs) in future ultra-wideband systems because the existing DPD system requires multiple times the input signal bandwidth in the transmitter and receiver chain, which is sometimes almost impossible to implement in practice. In this paper, we present a novel band-limited digital predistortion technique in which a band-limiting function is inserted into the general Volterra operators in the DPD model to control the signal bandwidth under modeling, which logically transforms the general Volterra series-based model into a band-limited version. This new approach eliminates the system bandwidth constraints of the conventional DPD techniques, and it allows users to arbitrarily choose the bandwidth to be linearized in the PA output according to the system requirement without sacrificing performance, which makes the DPD system design much more flexible and feasible. In order to validate this idea, a high-power LDMOS Doherty PA excited by various wideband signals, including 100-MHz long-term evolution advanced signals, was tested. Experimental results showed that excellent linearization performance can be obtained by employing the proposed approach. Furthermore, this technique can be applied to other linear-in-parameter models. In future ultra-wideband systems, this new technique can significantly improve system performance and reduce DPD implementation cost.