Reducing Power Consumption of Digital Predistortion for RF Power Amplifiers Using Real-Time Model Switching

In this article, we propose a new behavioral modeling method to reduce the running complexity and power consumption of digital predistortion (DPD) models for radio frequency power amplifiers. By employing the proposed method, different cross terms in a DPD model can be switched dynamically in real time. Each cross-term branch can further choose the model coefficients from multiple coefficient sets, which improves the DPD performance with little extra complexity. The switch of both cross-term branches and model coefficients is realized using a decision tree-based switch controller, leading to very low run-time complexity. By optimizing the selection process, different input samples can choose the most suitable model configuration that contributes most to the linearization performance. As only one branch is activated at a time, the power consumption can be greatly reduced. Based on the experimental results, the proposed method can achieve excellent linearization performance with significantly reduced power consumption.