UPC and CTTC organize this year’s “Power Amplifier Digital Pre-distortion Linearization Design Competition” at the International Microwave Symposium in Hawaii

Pere L. Gilabert and Gabriel Montoro, professors at Escola d'Enginyeria de Telecomunicació i Aeroespacial de Casteldefels (EETAC) from Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), and David López, Researcher at CTTC’s PHYCOM department and PhD student at UPC, have organized this year’s Power Amplifier (PA) Linearization through Digital Pre-distortion (DPD) Design Competition (SDC#6), sponsored by Rohde & Schwarz and the IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society (MTT-S) Digital Signal Processing (MTT-9) and Microwave Measurements (MTT-11) Technical Committees. The competition will be celebrated during the International Microwave Symposium (IMS) to be held 4–9 June 2017 in Honolulu (HI, USA), which the largest international conference devoted to the research, development, and application of RF and microwave theory and techniques and is expected to draw over 8,000 participants and 500 exhibiting companies from around the world.

The objective of this year’s competition is to design an appropriate DPD algorithm for the linearization of a 4G handset power amplifier (PA) with dynamic supply to be used in 4G handsets operating with dual-band OFDM-like waveforms. The scoring algorithm will reward maximizing the output power, PA efficiency and signal quality while minimizing spectral regrowth due to PA distortion. In order to give the participants a possibility to test their linearization algorithms in advance, the dpdcompetition webpage makes available all the information and access mechanisms to remotely use the competition’s state-of-art measurement setup: The participants will be able to access via world wide web (www) the remoteUPCLab to upload the predistorted baseband signals and the supply waveform to the corresponding vector signal generator (VSG) and retrieve the PA response and the baseband output signal by the signal and spectrum analyzer (SSA).

This work was partially funded by the Spanish Government and FEDER under MINECO projects TEC2014-58341-C4-3-R and TEC2014-58341-C4-4-R, and the Generalitat de Catalunya under the grant 2014SGR1151 awarded to the Communication Technologies Group at CTTC.