Analysis and Compensation of RF Path Imbalance in LINC System

In this paper, we analyse the effect of the path imbalances(gain and phase mismatches) in LINC(LInear amplification with Nonlinear Component) system, and propose a simple scheme using LUTs(Look Up Table) to compensate the path imbalances. The EVM(Error Vector Magnitude) and ACPR(Adjacent Channel Power Ratio) of the LINC system are degraded significantly by the path imbalances because it adopts an outphasing technique. The EVM and ACPR are theoretically extracted for two variables(gain and phase mismatch factors) and 2-D LUTs for those are generated based on the analysis. The efficient and simple compensation scheme for the path imbalances is proposed using the 2-D LUTs. A LINC system with the suggested compensation scheme is implemented, and the proposed method is verified with an experiment. A 16-QAM signal with 1.5 MHz bandwidth is used. Before the compensation, the path gain ratio was 95 % and phase error was . The proposed scheme adjusts those values with 99 % and , and improves ACPR about 18.1 dB.