Test bed for power amplifier behavioral characterization and modeling

Traditional test bed of power amplifier (PA) behavioral characterization and modeling based on vector signal analyzer (VSA) and often equipped with specialized software is both expensive and inflexible to modify to suit different scenarios. In this paper, a new test bed based on an oscilloscope or other general purpose data acquisition systems, which works as analog to digital converter (ADC) with a proper (radio frequency) RF bandwidth and maximum sampling rate, is proposed. The common impairments, e.g. transmitter IQ imbalances, channel delay, frequency offset, and carrier phase offset, are all well compensated. The accurately recovered envelopes of the PA’s input and output signals are used for a PA behavioral characterization and modeling. Furthermore, Relative envelope error (REE) parameter is proposed to evaluate the accuracy of envelope recovery. The experiment shows a very accurate RF signal envelope recovery, and a good performance of PA behavioral modeling.