| In any system, the Power Amplifier (PA) is a critical component. It is typically the most costly single item and consumes most of the supply power. Knowledge of the possibilities for trading power per unit cost with efficiency and linearity often forms the basis for the entire system architecture design.
The increasing use of linearisation techniques, and especially the emergence of high speed digital processing as an enabling technology to implement predistortion on the PA input signal, represent an important paradigm shift in PA design. The PA component can now be designed with more emphasis on efficiency, without the traditional constraints of meeting stringent linearity specs simultaneously. Maximizing the utility of a lineariser in order to obtain optimum efficiency has thus become a new challenging area in modern RF PA design.
An RF power amplifier is a type of electronic amplifier used to convert a low-power radio-frequency signal into a larger signal of significant power, typically for driving the antenna of a transmitter. It is usually optimized to have high efficiency, high P1dB compression, good return loss on the input and output, good gain, and good heat dissipation. |
