Behavioral modeling of RF PAs under wideband load modulation

Abstract

This work proposes a behavioral modeling approach suitable for power amplifier (PA) operation under dynamic load modulation. The model accounts for the PA nonlinear dynamic effects by means of 1st order kernel functions of the modified Volterra formulation, extracted from automated Nonlinear Vector Network Analyzer (NVNA) measurements. Validation experiments under wideband load modulation are reported for a commercial PA concurrently excited by an RF multi-tone at the input, and by another multi-tone actively injected at the output in order to generate a dynamic load. The experiment is performed at 2.4 GHz with 20 MHz bandwidth signals.