An overview of radio frequency technologies and their influence on the power efficiency of wireless communication systems

This article presents an overview of the RF technologies and their influence on the power efficiency of wireless communication systems. It analyzes the different RF technologies by classifying the RF technologies in three main groups: environment, architecture and circuit level groups. The environment group comprises the RF technologies with direct relationship to the system link budget. The second group defines the technologies which are sensitive to the system architecture as envelope tracking, envelope elimination and restoration, digital pre-distortion and RF interference cancellation. Finally, circuit design techniques with local impact on the power consumption as power amplifier topologies, intermodulation reduction techniques and dynamic antenna matching are presented.