The effect of D/A accuracy on the performance of digital predistortion for RF power amplifiers

Nonlinearity has long been recognized as a problem endemic in power amplifiers (PA) with a high power. Digital predistortion (DPD) is one of most effective method to solve this problem. The D/A conversion accuracy on the performance of DPD for RF PA is tested in a hardware platform. The device under test is an actual working 30W PA operating at 881.5 MHz. An in-house DPD algorithm is implemented on an Altera Stratix II EP2S60 DSP development board. As the number of bits is decreased from 14 to 10, it is found that the adjacent channel leakage ratio (ACLR) at the PA output has no noticeable degradation. Below 10 bits, the ACLR started to deteriorate significantlyDepartment of Electronic and Information EngineeringRefereed conference pape