Despite the integrability and reconfigurability offered by fully digital wireless transmitters, their efficiency is still low, and no effective ways exist to diagnose and predict its degradation at higher back-off powers.Having found that it is the linear dependence of the switching losses with the output amplitude plus the inevitable constant losses that cause efficiency degradation at higher back-offs, an efficiency model was derived for carrier amplitude burst transmitter architectures. This model, not only allows the designer to predict the efficiency for a given modulation and output stage, but also allows one to identify the origin of the losses given an observed efficiency curve.