In today's digital world, information and communication technology accounts for 3% and 2% of the global power consumption and CO2 emissions respectively. This alarming figure is on an upward trend, as future telecommunications systems and handsets will become even more power hungry since new services with higher bandwidth requirements emerge as part of the so called ¿future internet¿ paradigm. In addition, the mobile handset industry is tightly coupled to the consumer need for more sophisticated handsets with greater battery lifetime. If we cannot make any significant step to reducing the energy gap between the power hungry requirements of future handsets, and what battery technology can deliver, then market penetration for 4G handsets can be at risk. Therefore, energy conservation must be a design objective at the forefront of any system design from the network layer, to the physical and the microelectronic counterparts. In fact, the energy distribution of a handset device is dominated by the energy consumption of the RF hardware, and in particular the power amplifier design. Power amplifier design is a traditional topic that addresses the design challenge of how to obtain a trade-off between linearity and efficiency in order to avoid the introduction of signal distortion, whilst making best use of the available power resources for amplification. However, the present work goes beyond this by investigating a new line of amplifiers that address the green initiatives, namely green power amplifiers. This research work explores how to use the Doherty technique to promote efficiency enhancement and thus energy saving. Five different topologies of RF power amplifiers have been designed with custom-made signal splitters. The design core of the Doherty technique is based on the combination of a class B, class AB and a class C power amplifier working in synergy; which includes 90-degree 2-way power splitter at the input, quarter wavelength transformer at the output, and a new output power combiner. The frequency range for the amplifiers was designed to operate in the 3.4 - 3.6 GHz frequency band of Europe mobile WiMAX. The experimental results show that 30dBm output power can be achieved with 67% power added efficiency (PAE) for the user terminal, and 45dBm with 66% power added efficiency (PAE) for base stations which marks a 14% and 11% respective improvement over current stateof- the-art, while meeting the power output requirements for mobile WiMAX applications.

High efficiency is an essential requirement for any system, where the energy can be saved with full retention of system performance. The power amplifier in modern mobile communications system consumes most of the supplied power through the dissipated power and the required cooling systems. However, as new services were added as features for the developed mobile generations, the required data rate has increased to fulfil the new requirements. In this case, the data should be sent with the allocated bandwidth, so complex modulation schemes are used to utilise the available bandwidth efficiently. Nevertheless, the modulated signal will have a Peak to Average Power Ratio (PAPR) which increases as the modulation complexity is increasing. In this case, the power amplifier should be backed off and designed to provide good linearity and efficiency over high PAPR. Among the efficiency enhancement techniques, the Doherty technique (Load modulation technique) is the simplest one, where no additional circuity nor signal processing is required. In this work, the theory of load modulation amplifiers is investigated through two asymmetrical Doherty Power Amplifiers (DPA) targeting 3.3-3.5 GHz were designed and fabricated using two transistors (25 W and 45 W). In addition, more compact load modulation amplifiers targeting sub 6-GHz bandwidth of 5G specifically 3.4-3.8 GHz is discussed including the theory of implementing these amplifiers, where different amplifier capabilities are explored. Each amplifier design was discussed in detail, in which the input and output matching networks were designed and tested in addition to the design of the stability circuit to make sure that the amplifier is stable and working according to the specified requirements. The fabricated circuits were evaluated practically using the available instrument test, whereas Microwave Office software was used for the simulation purpose, each amplifier was designed separately, where all the designed amplifiers were able to provide the targeted efficiency at different back-off power points. Besides, some additional factors that affect the designed load modulation amplifiers such as the effect of the harmonics at the back-off and mismatching the amplifier is discussed. / European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (SECRET)

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Advanced achievements in the area of RF circuit design led to a significant increase in availability of wireless communications in everyday life. However, the rapid growth in utilizing the RF equipment has brought several challenges in different aspects of RF circuit design. This has been motivating researchers to introduce solution to cope with these challenges and further improve the performance of the RF circuits. In this dissertation, we focus on the improvements in three aspects of the circuit design. High temperature and temperature compensated transmitter design, ultra-low phase noise signal generators, and compact and low complexity polar transmitter design. Increase in the ambient temperature can impact the performance of the entire communication system. However, the RF hardware is main part of the system that is under the impact of the temperature variations in which it can change the characteristics of the individual building blocks of the RF chain. Moreover, transistors are the main elements in the circuit whose performance variation must be consider when the design target is compensating the temperature effects. The influence of the temperature variation is studied on the transistors and the building blocks in order to find the most effective approaches to compensate these variations and stabilize the performance of the RF chain at temperatures up to 220 C. A temperature sensor is designed to sense these variations and adjust the characteristics of the circuit components (e.g. bias voltages), accordingly. Further, a new variable gain phase shifter (VGPS) architecture is introduced toward minimizing the temperature impact on its performance in a phased-array transmitter architecture. Finally, a power amplifier as the last stage in a transmitter chain is designed and the variation in its performance with temperature is compensated through the VGPS stage. The transmitter is prototyped to evaluate its performance in practice. Another contribution of this dissertation is to introduce a novel voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) structure to reduce the phase noise level below state-of-the-art. The noise to phase noise mechanism in the introduced doubly tuned oscillator is studied using linear time-variant (LTV) theory to identify the dominant noise sources and either eliminate or suppress these noise sources by introducing effective mechanism such as impedance scaling. The designed VCO is fabricated and measurement results are carried out that justified the accuracy of the analyses and effectiveness of the introduced design approach. Lastly, we introduce a compact and simple polar transmitter architecture. This type of transmitters was firstly proposed to overcome the serious shortcomings in the IQ transmitters, such as IQ imbalance and carrier leakage. However, there is still several challenges in their design. We introduce a transmitter architecture that operates based on charge to phase translation mechanism in the oscillator. This leads to significantly reduction in the design complexity, die area, and power dissipation. Further, it eliminates a number of serious issues in the design such as sampling rate of the DACs. comprehensive post-layout simulations were also performed to evaluate its performance. / Doctor of Philosophy / To keep up with the ever-growing demand for exchanging information through a radio frequency (RF) wireless network, the specification of the communication hardware (i.e. transmitter and receiver) must be improved as the bottleneck of the system. This has been motivating engineers to introduce new and efficient approaches toward this goal. In this dissertation however, we study three aspects of the circuit design. First, variation in the ambient temperature can significantly degrade the performance of the communication system. Therefore, we study these variations on the performance of the transmitter at high temperature (i.e. above 200 C). Then, the temperature compensation approaches are introduced to minimize the impact of the temperature changes. The effectiveness of the introduced techniques are validated through measurements of the prototyped transmitter. Second, signal generators (i.e. oscillators) are the inseparable blocks of the transmitters. Phase noise is one of the most important specifications of the oscillators that can directly be translated to the quality and data rate of the communication. A new oscillator structure targeting ultra-low phase noise is introduced in the second part of this dissertation. The designed oscillator is fabricated and measured to evaluate its performance. Finally, a new polar transmitter architecture for low power applications is introduced. The transmitter offers design simplicity and compact size compared to other polar transmitter architectures while high performance.

As the demand for wireless electronics is increasing, more and more gadgets are connected wirelessly and devices are being improved constantly. The need of the new research and development for advance electronics with high performances is the priority. The data transfer rates are improved for faster communication and better efficiency is to reduce the battery consumption in handheld devices. This thesis presents three single-stage power amplifiers (PAs): class-AB, class-F and inverse class-F (class-F-1) at 28 GHz. The PAs have identical input networks: input matching, base DC feed, and base stabilizing networks. At the load side, there is a different load network for each PA. Class-AB PA load network has a single inductor with a parasitic capacitor to create a resonance at 28GHz. Class-F PA load network is composed of a parallel network (one LC tank in series with an inductor) and a series network (one 3f0-resonance LC tank in series with a capacitor) to create a multi-resonance load network. Class-F-1 load network is composed of a parallel network (two LC tank in series with an inductor) and a series network (one 2f0-resonance LC tank in series with a capacitor) to have a multi-resonance network. The main purpose of using multi-resonance load networks in class-F and class-F-1 is to shape the collector currents and voltages in order to achieve the highest efficiency possible. The chosen bias point is VCE=2.3V and ICE~12mA. As the results, class-AB PA achieves the peak PAE of 44%, 15 dBm OP-1dB, >19 dBm Psat , and 10 dB Gp. Class-F PA achieves the peak PAE of 46%, 14.5 dBm OP-1dB, ~18 dBm Psat , and 10 dB Gp. Class-F-1 PA achieves the peak PAE of 45%, 15.1 dBm OP-1dB, >18 dBm Psat , and 10 dB Gp.. In order to compare the linearity performances among three PA classes, a two-tone signal and a modulated signal with different modulation schemes (QPSK, 16QAM, 64QAM, and 256QAM) are applied to the PAs to produce IM3, ACPR, and EVM. After the analysis and comparison on efficiency and linearity, class-F PA gives the highest efficiency but has the worst linearity while class-AB has the best linearity but has the worst efficiency among three. Class-F-1 PA results lies in the middle of two other classes in term of efficiency and linearity. / Master of Science

Yes / This paper presents an approach to implement an automatically tuning antenna for optimising power transfer suitable for software defined radio (SDR). Automatic tuning is accomplished using a closed loop impedance tuning network comprising of an impedance sensor and control unit. The sensor provides the control unit with data on the transmit or receive power, and the algorithm is used to impedance of a T-network of LC components to optimize the antenna impedance to maximise power transmission or reception. The effectiveness of the proposed tuning algorithm in relation to impedance matching and convergence on the optimum matching network goal is shown to be superior compared with the conventional tuning algorithm. / This work is partially supported by innovation programme under grant agreement H2020-MSCA-ITN-2016 SECRET-722424 and the financial support from the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) under grant EP/E022936/1

ITC/USA 2005 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-First Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 24-27, 2005 / Riviera Hotel & Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / A conventionally designed radio frequency amplifier operated in its linear region exhibits low DC to RF conversion efficiency. Typically, for a power amplifier designed for digital modulation applications, the amplifier is operated “backed-off” from its P1dB point by a factor of 10 or -10 dB. The typical linear amplifier is biased for either Class A or Class A/B operation depending on the acceptable design trade-offs between efficiency and linearity between these two methods. A novel design approach to increasing the efficiency of a linear RF power amplifier using a modified Odd-Way Doherty technique is presented in this paper. The design was simulated, built and then tested. The design yields improvements in efficiency and linearity.

Thesis (MScEng (Electrical and Electronic Engineering))--University of Stellenbosch, 2005. / In RF power transistor characterisation, the designer is confronted with low impedance measurements (typically from 1 Ohm to 12 Ohm). These transistors are contained in metal-ceramic packages of which the lead widths vary with power capability. This thesis presents a high-quality fixture design with low impedance TRL calibration standards for characterisation of an LDMOS transistor. Pre-matching networks are used to transform to the low impedance environment. Since these pre-matching networks are independent of the termination impedance, the low impedance port can always be designed to comply with the same dimension as the device which is being measured.

The objective of this research work is to investigate, design and measurement of a digital predistortion linearizer that is able to compensate the dynamic nonlinear distortion of a High Power Amplifier (PA). The effectiveness of the proposed baseband predistorter (PD) on the performance of a WLAN OFDM transmitter utilizing a nonlinear PA with memory effect is observed and discussed. For this purpose, a 10W Class-A/B power amplifier with a gain of 22 dB, operated over the 3.5 GHz frequency band was designed and implemented. The proposed baseband PD is independent of the operating RF frequency and can be used in multiband applications. Its operation is based on the Hammerstein system, taking into account PA memory effect compensation, and demonstrates a noticeable improvement compared to memoryless predistorters. Different types of modelling procedures and linearizers were introduced and investigated, in which accurate behavioural models of Radio Frequency (RF) PAs exhibiting linear and nonlinear memory effects were presented and considered, based on the Wiener approach employing a linear parametric estimation technique. Three new linear methods of parameter estimation were investigated, with the aim of reducing the complexity of the required filtering process in linear memory compensation. Moreover, an improved wiener model is represented to include the nonlinear memory effect in the system. The validity of the PA modelling approaches and predistortion techniques for compensation of nonlinearities of a PA were verified by several tests and measurements. The approaches presented, based on the Wiener system, have the capacity to deal with the existing trade-off between accuracy and convergence speed compared to more computationally complex behavioural modelling algorithms considering memory effects, such as those based on Volterra series and Neural Networks. In addition, nonlinear and linear crosstalks introduced by the power amplifier nonlinear behaviour and antennas mutual coupling due to the compact size of a MIMO OFDM transmitter have been investigated.