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In this study, we proposed a pre-distorted driver of a power amplifier in which the driver stage can serve as a pre-distorter of the power stage. In order to secure the linearity of the power amplifier, AM-PM distortions according to the input power of the common-source (CS) and two stacked-FET structures were analyzed and compared with the simulated results. Based on the analyzed AM-PM distortions of the two structure, it was verified that the driver stage with CS structure can act as a pre-distorter of the power stage with the two stacked-FET structure by optimizing the bias voltages of the two structures. The Ka-band power amplifier was designed with a 65-nm CMOS process to verify the feasibility of the proposed pre-distorted driver stage. At 28 GHz, the measured P1dB, saturated output power (P $_{\mathrm {SAT}}$ ), and peak power-added efficiency (PAE) were 18.6 dBm, 19.7 dBm, and 32.9%, respectively. The measured small signal gain was 24.1 dB. When 5G-NR modulation signals (64-QAM, 100-Msym/s, 9.7-dB PAPR) were used, under conditions where the EVM was less than –25 dB, the measured output power and ACLR were 13.3 dBm and –29.4 dBc, respectively.

One of the major problems faced in digital communication systems is Inter-Symbol Interference (ISI), induced by the propagation channel in the single carrier based systems. Classic digital equalization techniques based on pilot training sequences become tedious in the presence of nonlinear power amplifiers. The existing techniques for digital pre-distortion need a high transmitter computation complexity and those for the post-distortion require pilot overhead. In this review, we focus on fully generic blind processing for both channel equalization and power amplifier post-distortion. We propose a receiver based on two complex-valued neural networks (CV-NN). The first CV-NN is dedicated to generic blind equalization (GBE) to mitigate ISI. The second one is used for generic blind post-distortion compensation (GBPDC) of the power amplifier nonlinearity (PANL). The GBE and the GBPDC have no prior information about the transmission channel, the used constellation, and the PA model. For the first CV-NN, we consider an updated probability density fitting (PDF) based criteria, corresponding to many assumed possible constellations, that are used jointly with an automatic modulation classification (AMC) based on the k-nearest neighbors (KNN) algorithm. For the second CV-NN, we use the final updated PDF criterion resulting from the first CV-NN training process. Numerical results show that our generic blind Deep learning-based signal receiver formed with the two CV-NNs is effective in alleviating the two coupled signal distortions: the ISI and the PANL. Compared with the state-of-the-art methods, banking on a supervised post-distortion compensation and channel equalization, the proposed generic blind DL-based scheme exhibits good detection performance.

Organic photo-detector (OPD) is lightweight and physically flexible. It can transform plastic or glass into smart surfaces. Visible light communication (VLC) is considered as one of the promising technologies for the future wireless communications. VLC combines the advantages of lighting and communication simultaneously. Besides, it can be deployed using existing lighting infrastructure; hence little extra cost is needed to provide this wireless communication. As the OPD has a large optical detection area, it would be interesting to employ the OPD as VLC receiver (Rx). If the OPD can be used in the VLC systems, it can benefit the Internet-of-Thing (IoT) networks by providing efficient human-to-machine and machine-to-machine communications. However, implementing VLC using OPD Rx is challenging. Due to the slow charging and discharging processes of the OPD, the optical-to-electrical response speed is limited. Besides, the OPD requires external bias to be operated. Here, we propose and demonstrate using pre-distortion scheme for pulse-amplitude-modulation (PAM) signal to a self-powered PCBM:P3HT OPD to enhance the VLC transmission performance. The operation of the self-powered PCBM:P3HT OPD is discussed. Both experiments using PAM-2 and PAM-4 (with and without pre-distortion) are evaluated. The performance, requirement and capability limitations of the pre-distortion schemes are also analyzed and discussed by using numerical simulations.