A 500 MHz portable evaluation platform for digital pre-distortion and envelope tracking power amplifiers

Abstract

Efficiency and linearity are important design criteria for power amplifier (PA) designers. These two constraints usually contradict each other in the realm of PAs. However, with many recent efforts, various architectures such as envelope tracking, when used in conjunction with digital pre-distortion, allow the system to achieve both efficiency and linearity simultaneously. Many of the available evaluation platform/testbeds today are limited in bandwidth to ~200 MHz. This limits the bandwidth of the supported signal to ~40 MHz. As talk of future 5G LTE systems call for signal bandwidths of greater than 100 MHz, the need for an evaluation platform with 500 MHz is crucial. In this work, a 500 MHz bandwidth evaluation platform for DPD development and envelope tracking design will be presented.