Analog Predistorter Averaged Digital Predistortion for Power Amplifiers in Hybrid Beam-Forming Multi-Input Multi-Output Transmitter

For higher data throughput, the Massive Multi-input Multi-output (MIMO) system has been widely used in modern communication systems. Due to the circuit size and power consumption, it is difficult to integrate one Radio Frequency (RF) chain for each power amplifier (PA). As a result, MIMO transmitters with hybrid beam-forming don't have enough RF chains, and this demands the digital predistortion (DPD) block to deal with several power amplifiers (PA) simultaneously, which causes a shared DPD problem. This article presents an Analog Predistorter Averaged DPD (A(2)-DPD) for hybrid beam-forming massive MIMO transmitters. To linearize more than one PAs with one shared digital predistortion unit, continuously tunable Analog Predistortion (APD) modules are employed to uniform the nonlinear behavior of PAs in each channel. Based on iterative learning control (ILC) technique, crossed normalized mean square error (CNMSE) is derived to judge the uniformity of PAs. By comparing the CNMSE of each PAs, the best similarity state of PAs can be found. The nonlinear behavior of PAs can be adjusted to a similar state by tuning the APD control voltage. The adjustment makes PAs easier to be linearized by a shared DPD. Furthermore, an averaged DPD algorithm is proposed to improve the total linearity performance for each PA. Simulations are performed to study the relationship between CNMSE and PA uniformity and further simulations show the ability of A(2)-DPD to deal with a multi-PA scenario. In the end, to verify the feasibility of the proposed A(2)-DPD, two class-AB PAs with operating frequency at 3.5 GHz with the same type transistor and similar design are tested. Experimental results show the proposed A(2)-DPD can significantly improve the uniformity of PAs and the Adjacent Channel Power Ratio (ACPR) can be improved by 8 dB compared with using the DPD parameter of the other PA.