UC San Diego

High efficiency radio frequency (RF) power amplifiers (PAs) are critical in portable battery-operated wireless communication systems because they can dominate the power consumption. Linear power amplifier is required for envelope modulated signal. Traditionally, linear power amplifiers are implemented by "backing-off" the Class-A or Class-AB PA. However for a high peak-to-average (PAR) signal, the average efficiency is much lower than the peak efficiency, which is well down as the inherent trade-off between linearity and efficiency. This dissertation focuses on Envelope Elimination and Restoration (EER) and Envelope Tracking (ET) efficiency enhancement techniques to improve the PA average efficiency for high PAR signal. The EER and ET PA structures are investigated. Wideband ET and "hybrid" EER structures are proposed for WLAN 802.11g signal at 20MHz signal. Two major challenges of the wideband EER and ET PAs are investigated: 1) An adaptive time-alignment algorithm was proposed to calibrate the time-mismatch in wideband EER and ET systems; (2) A high efficiency wideband envelope amplifier is designed for wideband EER and wideband ET applications. A monolithic wideband high efficiency ET power amplifier is designed and implemented for WLAN 802.11g applications in IBM SiGe BiCMOS technology. Digital pre-distortion was implemented to reduce the EVM of the amplifier. The measured overall power-added efficiency of the amplifier is 28% at 20 dBm (100mW) output power