Time-domain envelope measurement technique with application to wideband power amplifier modeling

This paper presents a new time-domain measurement technique for repetitive microwave signals that is applied to modeling wideband power amplifiers. Th e measurement technique concept consists of recording the microwave signal after conversion to baseband using a calibrated downconverter, which improv es measurement accuracy compared to measurements at the carrier frequency. The modeling section describes how such time-domain measurements can be use d to model wideband signal effects in nonlinear power amplifiers. The commo nly used memoryless envelope model is limited to use on narrowband signals. A new model is developed which includes a filter before the memoryless non linearity to capture the memory effects associated with wideband signals, I t is demonstrated that the accuracy of wideband signal simulations can be i mproved by optimizing the model parameters based on time-domain measurement s of wideband signals.