Browsing by Subject "Amplifier Nonlinearity"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3

Open Access
Adaptive digital predistortion for linearization of power amplifier
(2009) Şekerlisoy, Burak
In most communication systems, power amplifiers are used to obtain high output power. The nonlinear characteristics of the power amplifier leads to the distortion of the output signal. This distortion affects the efficiency of the power amplifier. The way to reduce this effect is to linearize the power amplifier near the saturation region where it is nonlinear. The widely used technique for the linearization of power amplifiers is predistortion. The proposed technique for predistortion uses a LUT(look-up-table), a complex multiplier, an address calculator, delay elements and an adaptation logic. A new adaptation logic to update the LUT coefficients, is used. The predistorter is simulated in Matlab software using a baseband model for the power amplifier. 16-QAM baseband modulation is used to simulate the predistorter. In order to see the performance of the proposed predistorter, hardware logic is implemented in FPGA and experimental setup with RF circuits and RF power amplifier is used. For different LUT sizes, the algorithm is tested and for the LUT size of 64, nearly 15 dB improvement in power spectrum is observed. The LUT size of 64 is observed to be the optimal LUT size in the experiments.
Open Access
Adaptive digital predistortion for power amplifier linearization
(2008) Aslan, Makbule Pehlivan
High power amplification of linear modulation schemes which exhibit fluctuating envelopes, invariably leads to the generation of distortion and intermodulation products. In order to avoid these effects, maintaining both power and spectral efficiency, it is necessary to use linearization techniques. By using linearization techniques, the amplifier can be operated near the saturation with good efficiency and linearity. The technique proposed here is predistortion based on a look-up table (LUT) method using input and output signal envelopes. The predistortion is implemented using a LUT and an address generation block that selects the appropriate coefficient from the LUT, given the magnitude of the input signal. The testing of the predistorter is done by using a baseband system model which consists of a 16-QAM modulator, an upsampler, a raised cosine filter, the predistorter and a baseband behavioural amplifier model. The performance of the predistorter with a new LUT update method is evaluated in terms of power efficiency and spectrum efficiency. MATLAB simulations show that to obtain up to 25-30 dB improvement in power spectrum is possible and sufficiently large LUT size is needed to reduce the background noise level. Furthermore, the performance of the predistorter in the case of an amplifier with memory is also investigated. The algorithms have been implemented on an FPGA chip. The performance of the system is as predicted in MATLAB simulations.
Open Access
Power amplifier linearization by predistortion
(2006) Durukal, Mustafa
Power amplifiers are important elements in communication systems but they are inherently nonlinear. This nonlinearity shows itself in the form of amplitude and phase distortion. One way to get rid of this nonlinear behaviour is to apply backoff which means to operate the amplifier at an output power smaller than its saturated output power. As the backoff is increased, the amplifier will behave more linearly. But this will also reduce the efficiency of the amplifier, which is undesirable. This tradeoff between efficiency and linearity is solved by linearization techniques. By using linearization techniques, the amplifier can be operated near to saturation with good efficiency and linearity. This thesis focuses on polar polynomial predistortion and polar look-up table predistortion, which are popular linearization techniques. A polar polynomial predistorter and a polar look-up table predistorter are implemented and tested with simulations in software. The implementation and testing is done by using IT++ which is a C++ library of mathematical, signal processing, speech processing, and communications classes and functions. The testing of the predistorters is done by using a baseband system model which consists of a 16-QAM modulator, an upsampler, a raised cosine filter, the predistorter and a baseband behavioural amplifier model. The performance of the predistorters is evaluated in terms of adjacent channel power ratio, AM/AM & AM/PM responses and BER under AWGN. Simulation results show that the predistorters have good performance. In the simulations, the polar polynomial predistorter achieved 20 dB reduction and the polar look-up table predistorter achieved 25 dB reduction in adjacent channel power ratio. The effect of polynomial order and table size on the performance of the predistorters is investigated. Furthermore, the effect of lowpass filtering on the performance of the predistorters is also investigated by placing a lowpass filter after the predistorters in the system model. It is observed that as the ratio of the bandwidth of the lowpass filter to the bandwidth of the raised cosine filter decreases, the negative effect of the lowpass filter on the performance of the predistorters increases.