Comparative analysis of LINC transmitter performances with class AB and class F power amplifiers

Linear amplification using nonlinear components (LINC) is an architecture that achieves linear power amplification for radio-frequency (RF) transmitters. This paper presents an analysis of the sizing of a Chireix coupler used in this architecture. The objective here is to find the optimum combiner topology so that the best compromise between power efficiency and linearity can be achieved. As this compromise depends on the class of the power amplifier (PA) we focused our work, for this study, on an overdriven class - AB PA and a class - F PA. Both transmitters are evaluated using a 16QAM digital modulation.