Reduction of Intermodulation Effects in Power Amplifiers through Segmented Predistortion

Current communication standards, such as DAB, DVB-T or 4G impose strong requirements to limit the negative effects on modulated signals of distortion or bad synchronization between emitter and receiver in digital channels. Distortion is mainly due to the nonlinear behavior of the output stage of the emitter´s power amplifier, in the form of saturation or memory effects. In order for these effects to be mitigated, a correction can be applied to the input signals, causing them a distortion contrary to that occurring in the amplifier. Several analog and digital predistortion techniques have been proposed in the literature. This paper presents a new digital predistortion method which allows the requirements of DVB-T gap fillers in single frequency networks (SFN) to be accomplished while reducing processing time and complexity with regard to previous solutions. Experimental results are presented which support the claimed contributions of the method.