Energy-Efficient Digital Predistortion With Lookup Table Training Using Analog Cartesian Feedback

We demonstrate energy-efficient low-complexity adaptive linearization for wideband handset power amplifiers (PAs). Due to power overhead and complexity, traditional wideband linearization techniques such as adaptive digital predistortion (DPD) thus far have not been used for wideband handset transmitters. Our energy-efficient lookup table training strategy resulted in a training energy of 1.83 nJ/entry for a 5-MHz bandwidth WiMAX orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) transmission, which represents more than 40times improvement over state-of-the-art DPD implementations. Our experimental prototype transmitter achieves a maximum of 9.9-dB improvement of adjacent channel leakage power at 5.15-MHz offset with 22.0-dBm channel power in the 5-MHz bandwidth WiMAX-OFDMA transmission. This linearity improvement offers 26.5% savings in PA power consumption by reducing power backoff.