Design of an Adaptive Predistorter for Solid State Power Amplifier in Wireless OFDM Systems

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is a powerful modulation choice for wideband wireless communication systems. However, its high peak-to-average power ratio greatly limits the high power amplifier (HPA) power efficiency. Here, we present the design of an adaptive predistorter to compensate the distortion caused by the HPA. Specifically, we deal with the implementation issue of the proposed predistorter in Lee and de Figueiredo's work (2006). The performance improvement by predistorter is verified by both floating-point simulation and fixed-point simulation, where the latter includes the distortion effects from the hardware. The bit widths for OFDM signals, ADC, and DAC are evaluated, and the bit width of 10 is shown to be sufficient for the hardware design. Copyright (C) 2009 Rui J. P. de Figueiredo et al.