What's New in Digital Pre-Distortion?

In cellular wireless communications systems, the RF power amplifier (PA) in the transmitter must be as efficient as possible, to minimize energy costs, to prolong battery life, and to account for ‘green’ considerations. Modern spectrally-efficient, digitally-modulated signals such as LTE and UMTS present a challenge for efficient RF PA design, and the PA architectures that are adopted to achieve this goal are generally very nonlinear, and so some form of linearization technique is necessary. In this webinar we will highlight some of the challenges that are being faced in the field of linearization of PAs using digital pre-distortion (DPD). These challenges result from the demands of higher spectral efficiency digital communication signals, wider bandwidth and multi-protocol signals, higher frequency radio operation, more rapid convergence in adaptive DPD – so-called ‘real-time’ DPD, greater linearization accuracy, and the ability to accommodate memory effects. Some techniques will be offered for meeting these challenges, and ideas for new directions for DPD.