Designing, optimizing and producing modern power amplifiers (PA) requires new and fast RF (radio frequency) measurement techniques capable of characterizing its real behavior. Power amplifiers are a truly multidimensional device where many desired performance parameters are contradictory to each other. This is especially true for the generation of modern communication PAs that require high efficiency, high linearity as well as high bandwidth. This paper presents a software-defined measurement setup for fast and cost efficient multidimensional measurements based on highly accurate standard instruments and a PC. The test bed as well as the graphical user interface is presented along with a demonstration of its functionality. During tuning of tank networks, drain quiescent current, and bias conditions, 3-dimensional graphs can be selected for the most appropriate axes of trade-off parameters to display a true behavior of the PA under test subjected to real-world or close to real-world signals. The measurement system offers the possibility to monitor envelope-tracking dynamic power consumption up to 100 MHz plus the possibility to use high crest factors.

In this paper a radio frequency power amplifier is measured and characterized by the use of undersampling based on the generalized Zhu-Frank sampling theorem. A test system has been designed allowing the bandwidth of the stimuli signal to be 100 MHz in the characterization process. That would not be possible with any vector signal analyzer on the market. One of the more challenging problem within the proposed concept is the model validation process. Here, two different techniques for model validation are proposed, the multitone and the spectrum scan validation methods.

In this paper we evaluate the generation of a multi-tone set for characterizing the behavior of nonlinear radio frequency (RF) modules in its out-of-band when harmonic sampling is used as digitizer. The purpose is to provide the reader with a tool to select proper frequencies and record length for a given application and test-bed. The method is based on simulations and the use of Sidon sequences. The proposed method is applicable to sparse discrete frequency multi-tones.

We evaluated the application of convex optimization to peak-to-average power reduction on an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) 802.11a signal. A radio frequency power amplifier was excited with an OFDM-signal, and the peak-to-average reduced counterpart and its performance figure of merits were measured and compared. A state-of-art radio frequency test system with high accuracy was used for this purpose. Improvements due to optimization in output power and power added efficiency and the influence of the power distribution in the excitation signal on power amplifier performance were investigated. Improvements of 6dB in output power and 6.5% in power added efficiency were achieved on average near the operating region. The effect of preserving power-free guard subcarriers was introduced in the optimization algorithm and investigated regarding adjacent channel interference. An improvement of 9dB from that aspect was observed using half of the power-free subcarriers, which reveals the importance of a guard interval.