Modeling efficiency of carrier amplitude burst wireless transmitter systems

Despite the integrability and reconfigurability offered by fully digital wireless transmitters, their efficiency is still low, and no effective ways exist to diagnose and predict its degradation at higher back-off powers. Having found that it is the linear dependence of the switching losses with the output amplitude plus the inevitable constant losses that cause efficiency degradation at higher back-offs, an efficiency model was derived for carrier amplitude burst transmitter architectures. This model, not only allows the designer to predict the efficiency for a given modulation and output stage, but also allows one to identify the origin of the losses given an observed efficiency curve.