Linearization study of a highly efficient CMOS-GaN RF pulse width modulation based transmitter

Abstract

This paper studies linearity of a 2 GHz, 10 Watt peak output power RF pulse width modulation (RF-PWM) based transmitter. The transmitter incorporates a tunable load network class-E PA as the final output stage. The tunable load network enables dynamic optimization of the class-E along with the duty cycle resulting in high efficiency over a wide range of output power levels. A digital predistiortion based linearization scheme is proposed to enhance the linearity of the transmitter. After linearization, the transmitter exhibits an adjacent channel power ratio (ACPR) of -45 dBc with a 3.84 MHz, 6.7 dB peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) W-CDMA signal. The average drain efficiency of the GaN HEMT output stage is 67% and the total transmitter efficiency is 54%.