Digital Predistortion of Ultra-Broadband mmWave Power Amplifiers with Limited Tx/Feedback Loop/Baseband Bandwidth

A novel digital predistortion (DPD) technique is proposed to linearize ultra-broadband millimeter wave (mmWave) power amplifiers (PAs) by only employing very limited bandwidth resources for the Tx, feedback loop (FB), and baseband (BB). Compared to the conventional methods, the proposed method will comprehensively reduce the bandwidth requirements for the whole system, which will make the linearization affordable for mmWave PAs. To validate the proposed idea, a 4-carrier 320 MHz modulated signal was employed to excite a mmWave PA with the center frequency of 41 GHz. Experimental results have proven that the proposed method can effectively realize the PA linearization with very narrow Tx/FB/BB bandwidth, which largely extends the capability of DPD to the forthcoming 5G era.