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We describe a new outphasing energy recovery amplifier (OPERA) which replaces the isolation resistor in the conventional matched combiner with a resistance-compressed rectifier for improved efficiency. The rectifier recovers the power normally wasted in the isolation resistor back to the power supply, while a resistance compression network (RCN) reduces the impedance variation of the rectifier as the output power varies. Because the combiner requires a fixed resistance at the isolation port to ensure matching and isolation between the two outphased power amplifiers (PAs), the RCN serves to maintain high linearity as well as high efficiency in the switching-mode PAs. For demonstration, a prototype OPERA system is designed and implemented with discrete components at an operating frequency of 48 MHz, delivering 20.8 W peak power with 82.9% PAE. The measurement results show an efficiency improvement from 17.9% to 42.0% for a 50-kHz 16-QAM signal with a peak-to-average power ratio of 6.5 dB.

We describe a new outphasing transmitter architecture in which the supply voltage for each PA can switch among multiple levels. It is based on a new asymmetric multilevel outphasing (AMO) modulation technique which increases overall efficiency over a much wider output power range than the standard LINC system while maintaining high linearity. For demonstration, the overall transmitter is simulated in a 65nm CMOS process with HSUPA and WLAN signals. The simulation results show an efficiency improvement from 17.7% to 40.7% for HSUPA at 25.3dBm output power and from 11.3% to 35.5% for WLAN 802.11g at 22.8dBm while still meeting system linearity requirements.

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We present a high-efficiency transmitter archi tecture based on asymmetric multilevel outphasing (AMO), but with a new method of generating discrete amplitude levels from the constituent amplifiers. AMO and multilevel LINC (ML-LINC) transmitters improve their efficiency over LINC by switching the supplies of the power amplifiers (PAs) among a discrete set of voltages. This allows them to minimize the occurrence of large outphasing angles. However, it is also possible to generate a discrete set of amplitudes by varying the duty cycle of the waveform that drives the PAs. The chief advantage of this discrete pulse width modulation (DPWM) is hardware simplicity, as it eliminates the need for a fast, low-loss switching network and a selection of power supply voltages. We demonstrate this concept with a 48-MHz, 20-W peak output power AMO transmitter using a four-level DPWM. At peak output power, the measured power-added efficiency is 77.7%. For a 16-QAM signal with a 6.S-dB peak to-average power ratio, the AMO prototype improves the average efficiency from 17.1% to 36.5% compared to the standard LINC system.