Design of wide-bandwidth envelope-tracking power amplifiers for OFDM applications

Abstract

An efficiency-enhanced power-amplifier system design is presented based on wide-bandwidth envelope tracking (WBET) with application to orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing wireless local area network systems. Envelope elimination and restoration (EER) and WBET are compared in terms of the time mismatch sensitivity between the base-band amplitude path and the RF path, and it is demonstrated that WBET is much less sensitive than EER to these effects. An adaptive time-alignment algorithm for the WBET system is developed and demonstrated. The analysis and algorithm are verified by experimental results. The measurement shows that the peak drain efficiency of the complete system was 30% at a 2.4-GHz orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing output power of 20 dBm.