Efficiency enhancement of an envelope tracking power amplifier combining supply shaping and dynamic biasing

This paper presents a new method to improve the performance of envelope tracking (ET) power amplifiers (PAs). The method consists of combining the supply modulation that characterizes the envelope tracking architecture with supply shaping and dynamic biasing. The inclusion of dynamic biasing allows a dynamic minimization of the current consumption while imposing simultaneously a constant gain condition. In such a way we maximize the efficiency of the ET transmitter maintaining a considerable linearity. Bias and supply voltages are modulated applying specific waveforms obtained as a function of the input envelope by means of two shaping functions jointly designed on the basis of a single-tone characterization. The presented technique is demonstrated by means of measurements on a commercial GaAs HBT power amplifier. Measured results showed a PA power added efficiency (PAE) of 51.9%, an error vector magnitude (EVM) of 1.2% and an adjacent channel power ratio (ACPR) of -39.4/-43.5 dBc. The presented transmitter architecture allowed an improvement of 12% PAE compared to a classical ET transmitter where the measured PA was biased in class-AB, maintaining the linearity indicators.