Concurrent Multiband Digital Outphasing Transmitter Architecture Using Multidimensional Power Coding

Abstract

All-digital outphasing transmitter architecture using multidimensional power coding (MDPC) is proposed for non-contiguous concurrent multiband transmission with a high power efficiency. MDPC transforms multiband digital baseband signals into multi-bit low-resolution digital signals that drive switching-mode PAs. A prototype digital outphasing transmitter consists of two 1-GHz bandwidth GaN Class-D PAs and a Chireix power combiner. The two GaN PAs are driven by bipolar RF PWM signals, which are transformed from a concurrent dual-band LTE signal by MDPC. The dual-band LTE signal with 15-MHz aggregate channel bandwidth at 240 MHz and 500 MHz frequency band is transmitted with -30 dBc and -37 dBc out-of-band emissions, respectively. Digital outphasing achieves more than two times higher coding efficiency than conventional concurrent dual-band digital transmitters with the same PAs in Class-S operation. Measured power coding efficiencies of 35.4% and 47.1% are observed with outphasing bipolar and 3-level RF PWM signals respectively, which are encoded from the dual-band LTE signal. IEEE MTT Transaction, PA Special IssueThis work may not be copied or reproduced in whole or in part for any commercial purpose. Permission to copy in whole or in part without payment of fee is granted for nonprofit educational and research purposes provided that all such whole or partial copies include the following: a notice that such copying is by permission of Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, Inc.; an acknowledgment of the authors and individual contributions to the work; and all applicable portions of the copyright notice. Copying, reproduction, or republishing for any other purpose shall require a license with payment of fee to Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, Inc. All rights reserved. Index Terms-Class-S power amplifier, concurrent dual-band transmitter, inter-band carrier aggregation, power coding, multiband delta-sigma modulator, outphasing.

Inter-band carrier aggregation digital transmitter architecture with concurrent multi-band delta-sigma modulation using out-of-band noise cancellation

“…dual-band transmission. When the frequency gap with inter band CA is small, the modulator stability with CMB-DSM implementation such as [4], [7] is degraded, which generates high peaking in the noise transfer function of the modulator.…”

“…Thus, an additional high-Q multi-band RF filter is necessary to suppress those undesirable out-of-band quantization noise [7].…”

An anti-alias harmonic-reject phase modulation for digital outphasing transmitter

“…Benefiting from the lower circuit complexity and lower power consumption of digital circuits, the trend in transmitter systems is moving into digital domain by utilizing digital modulator and switch-mode power amplifier (SMPA) [1,2,3,4,5,6]. Outphasing transmitter is an attractive structure to achieve all these objectives [2,3,4,5].…”

“…Benefiting from the lower circuit complexity and lower power consumption of digital circuits, the trend in transmitter systems is moving into digital domain by utilizing digital modulator and switch-mode power amplifier (SMPA) [1,2,3,4,5,6]. Outphasing transmitter is an attractive structure to achieve all these objectives [2,3,4,5]. However, digital outphasing transmitter suffers from ACLR degradation and OOB property deteriorated due to sampling images and harmonic components modulation, which are common problems for all kinds of digital transmitters [2,5,7,8,9,10].…”

“…Outphasing transmitter is an attractive structure to achieve all these objectives [2,3,4,5]. However, digital outphasing transmitter suffers from ACLR degradation and OOB property deteriorated due to sampling images and harmonic components modulation, which are common problems for all kinds of digital transmitters [2,5,7,8,9,10]. To address these issues, many authors presented alternative modulation options.…”