Digital predistortion for mitigating spurious emissions in spectrally agile radios

Spectrally non-contiguous transmissions pose serious transceiver design challenges due to the nonlinear PA. When two or more non-contiguous carriers with close proximity are amplified by the same PA, spurious emissions inside or in the vicinity of the transmitter RF band are created. These spurious emissions may violate emission limits or otherwise compromise network coverage and reliability. Lowering the transmit power is a straightforward remedy, but it will reduce throughput, coverage, and power efficiency of the device. To improve linearity without sacrificing performance, several DPD techniques have recently been proposed to target the spurious emissions explicitly. These techniques are designed to minimize the computational and hardware complexity of DPD, thus making them better suited for mobile terminals and other lowcost devices. In this article, these recent advances in DPD for non-contiguous transmission scenarios are discussed, with a focus on mitigating the spurious emissions in the concrete example case of non-contiguous dual-carrier transmission. The techniques are compared to more traditional DPD approaches in terms of their computational and hardware complexities, as well as linearization performance.