Efficiency Enhancement of mm-Wave Power Amplifiers Using Envelope Tracking

This letter presents a 44 GHz GaAs MMIC-based power amplifier (PA) which uses envelope tracking (ET) techniques for efficiency enhancement. Digital pre-distortion (DPD) is also employed to achieve high linearity. For a 7.6 dB PAPR 64QAM 20 MHz bandwidth signal (data rate 120 Mb/s) at an output power of 23.8 dBm, the measured EVM was 2.0% and ACPR1 was better than
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40 dBc. Power efficiency enhancement of more than 5.7 times for the final MMIC stage (from 1.22% to 7%) was measured, using an external drain modulator. To the authors' best knowledge, this is the first time envelope tracking has been applied to PAs in the millimeter wave regime.