Analysis and Digital Predistortion of in-Band Cross Modulation in Concurrent Multi-Band Transmitters

In multiband transmitters where two or more radios share the same power amplifier (PA), interferences can usually be kept below an acceptable level with the help of multi-band digital predistortion (DPD) techniques. This article reports on novel frequency scenarios in dual-band transmitters where additional cross-modulation products not reported before, are found to overlap and interfer with both the lower and upper-band signals. These cross-modulation products arise in-band when the frequency separation between the bands is close to a sub-harmonic of the band frequencies. The leading nonlinear cross-modulation products are identified for various frequency plans and found to be of increasing order as the frequency interval between the two carriers shrinks. A PA model featuring the four leading cross-modulation products is proposed and found to exhibit an accuracy close to the measurement noise floor when applied to three different PAs. The additional in-band distortions generated by the PA under such operation cannot be filtered or compensated using conventional dual-band DPD. When using the proposed model architecture with the indirect-learning predistortion methodology for linearizing dual-band PAs, DPD is found experimentally to improve the ACPR and EVM by 25 dBc and 11 percentage points, respectively. These and the other experimental results reported indicate that the proposed linearization algorithm provides a suitable method with high efficacy for these special dual-band scenarios.