Investigation of Intermodulation Distortion of Envelope Tracking Power Amplifier for Linearity Improvement

An intermodulation distortion of an envelope tracking (ET) power amplifier (PA) is investigated in this paper. For this purpose, the distortion characteristics are simulated based on the inter-connection model between the PA and supply modulator. For the sweet spot tracking ET operation, the fifth-order distortion is the most important one, which is generated by AM-PM nonlinearity. To reduce the distortion, the phase compensation network (PCN) is proposed. The efficiency of the PA is also improved by a properly designed bias circuit. For demonstration purposes, the PA and supply modulator are implemented using an InGaP/GaAs heterojunction bipolar transistor and a 0.18- μm CMOS process, respectively. The ET PA is tested at 1.85 GHz using a long-term-evolution signal with 10-MHz bandwidth, a 7.5-dB peak-to-average power ratio, and 16 quadrature amplitude modulation. The ET PA with the proposed PCN and the bias circuit delivers a power-added efficiency of 44.3%, a gain of 23.4 dB, an evolved universal terrestrial radio access adjacent channel leakage ratio of -38.4 dBc, and an error vector magnitude of 1.8% at an average output power of 27 dBm. The multiband characteristics of the proposed ET PA are measured across 1.7-2.0 GHz. These results are achieved without any digitally supported techniques, indicating that the design approach is a promising technique for handset ET PA applications.