Multilevel Linc System Design for Power Efficiency Enhancement

Abstract

Linear amplifier with nonlinear components (LINC) is a power amplifier (PA) linearization technique which offers both high PA efficiency and high linearity of wireless transmitters. But at the output stage, LINC uses a power combiner which results in low system efficiency. To solve this problem, we propose a multilevel out-phasing (MOP) scheme and a corresponding architecture, multilevel LINC (MLINC), to increase power combiner efficiency of wireless transmitters. Under WCDMA system linearity requirements, we demonstrate the 3-level MLINC as a design example which enhances power combiner efficiency from 44.5% to 75.5%.