Out-of-Band Digital Predistortion for Power Amplifiers With Strong Nonlinearity

Conventional full-band digital predistortion (DPD) suppresses the inband (IB) distortion to improve the error vector magnitude (EVM) performance and simultaneously suppresses the out-of-band (OOB) distortion to reduce the adjacent-channel interference. However, its performance is very limited when the nonlinearity is strong, especially in terms of suppressing the OOB distortion. This paper proposes an OOB DPD scheme for strong nonlinearity with a special focus on suppressing the OOB distortion to reduce the adjacent-channel interference. The proposed OOB DPD is featured by specifying an arbitrary OOB-distortion band for linearization and controlling the improvement level of EVM performance. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed OOB DPD can achieve superior performance in suppressing the OOB distortion when the nonlinearity is strong. We also present analyses to show that in strong nonlinearity cases with high compression, focusing on suppressing the OOB distortion at a specific band is an effective way to improve the suppression level of the target distortion. The proposed OOB DPD can further improve the transmission power under the assurance of low adjacent-channel interference. It can be applied in communications with urgent needs in high transmission power, high efficiency, and low adjacent-channel interference, such as military communications that usually adopt low-order modulations with low EVM requirements.