Gibbs-Phenomenon-Reduced Digital PWM for Power Amplifiers Using Pulse Modulation

The pulse-modulated polar transmitter (PMPT) uses radio-frequency (RF) phase modulated signal with pulse-width modulated envelope to drive a power amplifier (PA) as a switch to achieve high linearity and high efficiency. However, as the signal bandwidth increases, various non-idealities limit the performance of the PMPT architecture. In this paper, a Gibbs-phenomenon reduction filter is proposed with a partial Fourier series of digital pulse-width modulation (PWM) such that the pulsed signal is more immune to the distortion in nonlinear high-efficiency RF PAs. For validation, a prototype transmitter was tested with a 20-MHz bandwidth 256-QAM 5G new radio (NR) signal at 2.14 GHz. The proposed method achieved a drain efficiency of 28.3%, error vector magnitude (EVM) of 1.67%, and adjacent channel leakage ratio (ACLR) of -45.4 dBc at an output power of 18 dBm using the prototype transmitter. Linearity requirements for base stations were met without the use of any digital predistortion methods.