An Improved Power-Added Efficiency 19-dBm Hybrid Envelope Elimination and Restoration Power Amplifier for 802.11g WLAN Applications

Abstract

A comparison of envelope elimination and restoration (EER) and envelope tracking (ET) is discussed and a "hybrid" wideband EER power amplifier (PA) for the WLAN 802.11g system is proposed. A 60% efficiency (the output envelope signal power/input dc power) DC-20-MHz wideband envelope amplifier is designed for wideband EER and wideband ET (WBET) applications. A design method is developed to optimize the efficiency of the envelope amplifier for a given peak-to-average ratio and average slew rate of the envelope signal. An experimental "hybrid" Class-E EER system shows an overall efficiency (modulated RF output power/envelope amplifier dc input power) of 36% and power-added efficiency (the modulated RF output power/envelope amplifier dc input power plus RF input power) of 28% for a WLAN 802.11g signal at 19-dBm (80 mW) output power at 2.4 GHz. Digital predistortion, time alignment, and memory effect mitigation are implemented. The measured 3% error vector magnitude exceeds the 802.11g specification for 5% for a 54-Mb/s modulation signal