A Highly Linear Wideband Polar Class-E CMOS Digital Doherty Power Amplifier

A Highly Linear Wideband Polar Class-E CMOS Digital Doherty Power Amplifier

Hashemi, M. (TU Delft Electronics; ItoM)
Zhou, Lei (Ampleon)
Shen, Y. (TU Delft Electronics)
de Vreede, L.C.N. (TU Delft Electronics)

2019-10-01

This article presents the first application of a digital-intensive intrinsically linear digitally controlled class-E technique in a Doherty configuration. By careful nonlinear segmentation and multiphase RF-clocking along with overdrive-voltage control and automatic duty-cycle correction, it is shown that even the nonlinearities related to Doherty operation can be fully handled by the underlying design such that digital predistorion (DPD) can be, in principle, omitted. The nonlinearity behavior of the whole digital Doherty power amplifier (PA) is analyzed, and closed-form equations are given to predict the AM-AM and AM-phase modulation (PM) curves. In addition, time/phase mismatch between the peak and main branches and the AM and PM signals is accurately compensated. In order to achieve the maximum intrinsic linearity, two separate chips with the same architecture, but different design parameters, are fabricated as the main and peak amplifiers in 40-nm bulk CMOS. To achieve a large RF bandwidth and high passive combiner efficiency, a differential low-loss, wideband Marchand balun-based Doherty power combiner, implemented using reentrant coupled lines with independent second-harmonic control is proposed, and together with the matching network is fabricated on a two-layer PCB. The measured peak/6-dB power backoff P OUT, drain efficiency/power-added efficiency at 2.4 GHz are 17.5 dBm/12.2 dBm, 57%/52% and 36%/25% with VDD main/peak = 0.6 V/0.7 V. Measured results without using DPD show -41-dBc adjacent channel power ratio (ACPR) and -36-dB error vector magnitude (EVM) for a 16-MHz OFDM signal at 2.5 GHz. By using DPD, the measured ACPR and EVM of a 16-MHz/32-MHz OFDM signals are -52 dBc/-48 dBc and -50 dB/-48 dB, respectively.

CMOS
digital power amplifier (DPA)
digital predistortion (DPD)
Doherty PA
efficient
linear
multiphase RF-clocking
nonlinear sizing
overdrive-voltage control
wideband

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:0872d069-2401-4686-9155-e6c94a5ecf9b

https://doi.org/10.1109/TMTT.2019.2933204

0018-9480

IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques, 67 (10), 4232-4245

Accepted author manuscript

Institutional Repository

journal article

© 2019 M. Hashemi, Lei Zhou, Y. Shen, L.C.N. de Vreede