Title:  Digitally Assisted, Efficiency Enhanced, Linear RF Power Amplifier Architectures

Committee:

Dr. Steve Kenney, ECE, Chair , Advisor

Dr. David Anderson, ECE

Dr. Azadeh Ansari, ECE

Dr. Paul Yoder, ECE

Dr. Adeel Khalid, KSU

Abstract:

The objective of this thesis is to use the advanced digital techniques in the development of efficiency enhanced, linearized power amplifier (PA) architectures. In this research, digital enhancements are used to boost the efficiency of the dual-input Doherty PA. It is shown that the improved phase adjustment and the waveform conditioning for the Auxiliary PA, results in significant improvement in the efficiency of the Doherty PA. This efficiency improvement comes at the cost of degradation in linearity. A new segmented DPD architecture is proposed which subdivides the complete dynamic range of the Doherty PA into two power regions, a lower and a higher power region. As the nature of non-linearities exhibited by the Doherty PA are different in these distinct regions, the segmented DPD architecture is found suitable in this scenario. It is shown that by using the segmented DPD architecture, linearity requirements are adequately met.