A Potential Transmitter Architecture for Future Generation Green Wireless Base Station

Abstract

Current radio frequency power amplifiers in 3G base stations have very high power consumption leading to a hefty cost and negative environmental impact. In this paper, we propose a potential architecture design for future wireless base station. Issues associated with components of the architecture are investigated. The all-digital transmitter architecture uses a combination of envelope elimination and restoration (EER) and pulse width modulation (PWM)/pulse position modulation (PPM) modulation. The performance of this architecture is predicted from the measured output power and efficiency curves of a GaN amplifier. 57% efficiency is obtained for an OFDM signal limited to 8 dB peak to average power ratio. The PWM/PPM drive signal is generated using the improved Cartesian sigma delta techniques. It is shown that an RF oversampling by a factor of four meets the WLAN spectral mask, and WCDMA specification is met by an RF oversampling of sixteen.