1500 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MICROWAVE THEORY AND TECHNIQUES, VOL. 70, NO.
3, MARCH 2022
Reducing Power Consumption of Digital
Predistortion for RF Power Amplifiers
Using Real-Time Model Switching
Yue Li , Member, IEEE, Xiaoyu Wang , Graduate Student Member, IEEE,
and Anding Zhu , Senior Member, IEEE
Abstract— In this article, we propose a new behavioral mod-
eling method to reduce the running complexity and power
consumption of digital predistortion (DPD) models for radio
frequency power amplifiers. By employing the proposed method,
different cross terms in a DPD model can be switched dynami-
cally in real time. Each cross-term branch can further choose the
model coefficients from multiple coefficient sets, which improves
the DPD performance with little extra complexity. The switch of
both cross-term branches and model coefficients is realized using
a decision tree-based switch controller, leading to very low run-
time complexity. By optimizing the selection process, different
input samples can choose the most suitable model configuration
that contributes most to the linearization performance. As only
one branch is activated at a time, the power consumption can be
greatly reduced. Based on the experimental results, the proposed
method can achieve excellent linearization performance with
significantly reduced power consumption.
Index Terms— Behavioral modeling, decision tree, digital pre-
distortion (DPD), machine learning, power amplifier (PA), wire-
less transmitter.
I. I NTRODUCTION
W ITH various emerging applications, we are seeing
a new landscape of wireless connectivity. To meet
increasing demands for high speed and high capacity, small-
cell base stations and large-scale multiple-input–multiple-
output (MIMO) antenna arrays will be widely deployed in 5G
wireless networks [1]. Compared to that in earlier generation
macro base stations, the number of radio frequency (RF)
chains in 5G transmitters is significantly increased, which
demands for energy-efficient, low-cost, and highly integrated
solutions. This places significant challenges on designing
RF front-end circuits and systems. In the new application
scenarios, individual RF power amplifiers (PAs) are expected
to produce lower power, but they still need to maintain high
linearity to meet error vector magnitude and spectral emission
requirements [2].
Manuscript received August 6, 2021; revised September 26, 2021; accepted
October 30, 2021. Date of publication December 16, 2021; date of current
version March 4, 2022. This work was supported by the Science Foundation
Ireland under Grant 16/IA/4449 and Grant 17/NSFC/4850. (Corresponding
author: Yue Li.)
The authors are with the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering,
University College Dublin, Dublin, D04 V1W8 Ireland (e-mail: yue.li@ucd.ie;
xiaoyu.wang1@ucdconnect.ie; anding.zhu@ucd.ie).
Color versions of one or more figures in this article are available at
https://doi.org/10.1109/TMTT.2021.3132347.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TMTT.2021.3132347
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. For more information, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
In modern wireless transmitters, digital predistortion (DPD)
is widely employed to mitigate the nonlinear distortions caused
by the PAs [3]. The use of DPD allows PAs to be operated
at higher power levels for higher efficiency without losing
linearity. To reduce power consumption of the overall system,
when the PAs are designed to produce lower power, the
power budget for DPD shall shrink correspondingly. Hence,
it becomes important in optimizing the model complexity
and power consumption of DPD blocks to meet the system
efficiency requirements [4].
Traditionally, DPD models are constructed by pruning the
Volterra series. Some examples include memory polynomials
(MPs) [5], generalized memory polynomial (GMP) [6], and
dynamic deviation reduction (DDR) models [7]. To improve
the modeling performance while keeping low complexity,
different techniques have been proposed to design a composite
model by aggregating multiple small models. In the literature,
it has been achieved by combining the different models in
parallel [8] or in cascade [9], [10]. To reduce hardware
complexity, model structures different from polynomials have
also been proposed. One solution is to replace polynomials
with low-complexity basis functions, e.g., decomposed vector
rotation [11] and spline [12]. Lookup tables (LUTs) are also
widely used because of its low implementation cost [13], [14].
Similar to using LUTs, some existing works built model
in a piecewise manner by using different coefficient sets
for different input samples. The selection process can be
realized using vector switch [15], magnitude-selective affine
function [16], or decision tree [17].
Besides manually designed models, the structure of DPD
models can also be optimized using machine learning tech-
niques. Recently, various model pruning algorithms have
been developed to select effective model terms and remove
redundant basis functions from a large Volterra model [18].
The model selection process can also be implemented in the
DPD model adaptation unit to update the model structure
dynamically [19]. Thus, with the help of reconfigurable digital
circuit design techniques [20], power consumption of DPD can
be optimized. The complexity of DPD models also depends
on the design at digital hardware level. A common design
method is to realize the polynomial functions using LUTs [21],
[22], which minimizes computation by storing precomputed
results in memory. For polynomial-based implementation,
power consumption can also be reduced by optimizing the
LI et al.: REDUCING POWER CONSUMPTION OF DPD FOR RF PAs USING REAL-TIME MODEL SWITCHING
design of data path [23] or taking advantage of parallel
processing [24].
In this article, a novel real-time model switching technique
is presented to reduce the computational complexity of DPD
models. In the proposed approach, while multiple cross terms
and basis functions are implemented in the system, only the
most useful ones are selected and activated for each input
data sample in real-time operation. After choosing the suitable
cross terms, the model further selects the coefficients from
multiple coefficient sets. Thus, the model can dynamically
switch between different model terms and coefficients. The
switching process is realized via a decision tree model, which
is jointly optimized with the model coefficients using a novel
iterative alternate minimization algorithm. By using the pro-
posed approach, the computational complexity is significantly
reduced when calculating the predistorted output, and thus, the
power consumption of DPD can be much lower, compared to
that using the conventional methods.
The rest of this article is organized as follows. Section II
gives a brief background on the effect of cross terms in DPD
models. Section III describes the proposed model switching
technique and the design of switch controller. The training
method for the proposed model is presented in Section IV.
The experimental results and complexity analysis are reported
in Section V, followed by a conclusion in Section VI.
II. BACKGROUND
DPD takes effect by implementing an inverse nonlinear
model of the PA in digital baseband. For models that are linear
in parameters, DPD can be expressed in a matrix format as
u = Xc
where u = [ũ N , ũ N −1 , . . .]T is the predistorted signal vector
consisting of N data samples, c = [c1 , c2 , . . .]T is a vector
including all Q model coefficients, and X is an N × Q
regression matrix containing all basis functions constructed
with the input signal samples x̃. x̃ and ũ are both baseband
complex envelope signals. For example, in the MP model [5],
the basis functions have the form of
|x̃ n−m | p x̃ n−m
where p is the nonlinearity order, m is the delay number, and
X can be constructed as
⎡ ⎤
x̃ N |x̃ N |x̃ N |x̃ N |2 x̃ N · · · x̃ N −1 · · ·
⎢ ⎥
X = ⎣ x̃ N −1 |x̃ N −1 |x̃ N −1 |x̃ N −1 | x̃ N −1 · · · x̃ N −2 · · · ⎦. (3)
2
.. .. .. .. .. ..
. . . . . .
To effectively linearize PAs in wideband wireless trans-
mitters, more complex models are usually needed, due to
the complicated nonlinearity caused by high-efficiency PA
architectures and wideband modulation signals. In conven-
tional pruned Volterra models, various types of cross terms are
adopted, which mixes different delayed samples in polynomial
terms. In most cases, different memory samples are mixed
by either multiplying the amplitude |x̃| [25] or combining
different formats of complex samples, e.g., x̃ and x̃ ∗ , where
1501
(·)∗ indicates the conjugate operation [26], [27]. For example,
the GMP model [6] uses the term
|x̃ n−m−l | p x̃ n−m (4)
where l is the delay for lagging envelope. In the DDR
model [7], different types of cross terms are used, e.g.,
∗
|x̃ n | p x̃ n2 x̃ n−m (5)
|x̃ n | p |x̃ n−m |2 x̃ n . (6)
While the incorporation of rich basis functions leads to
improved accuracy, it results in high hardware complexity and
power consumption. On the one hand, considering the high
sampling rate required to process wideband signals, the power
consumption of DPD blocks may continue to increase [4],
while on the other hand, in future cellular systems, the use
of MIMO techniques and small-cell base stations reduces the
output power of individual PAs. To maintain the overall system
efficiency, the power budget of DPDs must shrink accordingly.
Thus, it is desirable to develop new methods to retain the
expressive power of these cross terms while minimizing the
cost in complexity.
III. R EAL -T IME M ODEL S WITCHING
In this work, we propose a novel model switching frame-
work to reduce the running complexity of DPD model.
In the proposed scheme, different model components can
be dynamically switched ON and OFF. Because only part of
hardware recourses is activated, dramatic reduction in power
consumption can be achieved. In this section, we introduce
two switching mechanisms, namely, cross-term switching and
(1) coefficient switching, as well as the design of switch controller,
in detail.
A. Cross-Term Switching
In the literature, different types of cross terms have been
proposed to improve the linearization performance of DPD
models. To ensure the modeling accuracy under varying
operating conditions, careful selection of basis functions is
necessary and the final model may need to include all helpful
(2) cross terms.
In the conventional setup, the DPD function is usually
fixed before implementation, and determining which terms to
include involves tedious trial-and-error procedures. In some
works [18], the selection of model basis functions can be
realized using model pruning algorithms, but they usually have
high computational complexity and can only operate in an off-
line environment.
Besides complexity concerns, from a behavioral modeling
perspective, using a fixed set of model basis functions may
not be the optimal design choice. Depending on the data
distribution and the PA characteristics, different data samples
may exhibit distinct nonlinear effect, and thus, they should be
modeled by using different types of nonlinear terms. It is hence
reasonable to adopt different model basis functions based
on the past and current input samples. Therefore, to reduce
the running complexity, we propose to switch between the
1502 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MICROWAVE THEORY AND TECHNIQUES, VOL. 70, NO. 3, MARCH 2022
Fig. 1. Illustration of cross-term switching.
Fig. 2. Cross-term switching applied to the GMP model.
different memory cross terms in real time using a switch
controller, as shown in Fig. 1. Different from the prior art,
as the controller is realized using a low-complexity classifi-
cation model, it can operate at sampling frequency and each
data sample can be predistorted using different parts of the
implemented model.
Let us consider the case of GMP model as an example.
Its cross-term part has the form |x̃ n−m−l | p x̃ n−m . Terms with
different values of l, e.g., |x̃ n−m−1 | p x̃ n−m and |x̃ n−m−2 | p x̃ n−m ,
are viewed as different types of cross terms and belong to
different branches of Fig. 1. As shown in Fig. 2, for different
input samples, the proposed model switches between different
cross-term branches, and only one type of cross term is
used. For example, if we choose to use the l = 1 branch,
|x̃ n−1 | p x̃ n and |x̃ n−m−1 | p x̃ n−m in the diagram will be used. The
final output is then produced after summing up all activated
nonlinear operators. As only one branch is turned on at a
time, the run-time complexity of the model is greatly reduced.
It is worth noting that the proposed strategy is very flexible
and widely applicable to different cross-term formulations. For
example, different DDR-type cross terms, such as (5) and (6),
can also be integrated into the switched DPD model.
Besides the switchable cross terms, we can also designate
some terms as “fixed terms.” As shown in Fig. 1, they are used
by all input data and always turned on. For example, since the
MP terms are not considered as cross terms in general, they
can be set as fixed terms.
B. Coefficient Switching
In prior work [15]–[17], it has demonstrated that, by switch-
ing the model coefficients based on signal characteristics,
Fig. 3. Model architecture with both cross-term and coefficient switching,
where α, β, γ , and θ are model coefficients.
TABLE I
D IFFERENT M ODES IN M ODEL S WITCHING
lower order models can achieve comparable or even better
performance than higher order models.
Inspired by the previous progress, to further enhance the
modeling capability, we use multiple sets of coefficients for
each cross-term type, and let the model select the most suitable
coefficient set for every data sample. Similar to the selection of
cross-term type, which coefficient set to use is also determined
by the controller. Thus, using multiple coefficient sets is
equivalent to adding new branches to the cross-term switching
architecture, except that the new branches have the same basis
functions as existing ones. Hence, coefficient switching can
also be understood as a generalization of cross-term switching
technique. With extra degrees of freedom, it can further extend
the modeling accuracy and flexibility of switched models.
A complete description of the model switching technique
employing both types of switching mechanisms is shown in
Fig. 3. The cross-term switching part controls which type of
cross term to activate. When specific cross terms are selected,
each nonlinear block can further choose the proper coefficients
from a pool of coefficient sets.
C. Realization of Switch Controller
Considering both cross-term and coefficient switching, the
controller needs to choose the proper operation state from a
number of possible configurations. In this work, we refer to
each potential configuration as an operation mode. Assuming
that there are K cross-term branches and T coefficient sets are
used for each branch, the model then has K T operation modes.
As an example, we consider a case with two GMP branches
and two coefficient sets for each branch. The designation of
the modes can be specified as that in Table I.
To build the switch controller, a multiclass classification
model is needed. Given the input data, such a classification
model will produce an integer output ranging from 1 to K T .
If the output is (t −1)K +k, it suggests that the kth cross-term
LI et al.: REDUCING POWER CONSUMPTION OF DPD FOR RF PAs USING REAL-TIME MODEL SWITCHING
Fig. 4. Decision tree as switch controller.
branch should be activated and the tth coefficient set of this
branch should be used. It is worth noting that, once trained,
the classification model can usually operate with very low
computational complexity. Thus, the switch controller can
make real-time decisions for every new input data sample.
In this work, decision tree is used to build the controller, and
we use |x̃ n−m | as splitting features for the tree. Compared with
other popular classification models, decision trees are widely
recognized to have low run-time complexity and competitive
accuracy [28]. An example of decision tree is shown in Fig. 4.
When a new input sample x̃ n comes in, it is directed to
the corresponding leaf node based on the value of splitting
features. In this example, if |x̃ n | = 0.5, we have |x̃ n | < 0.6 and
|x̃ n | ≥ 0.3, so the model should enter Mode 2. Thus, to process
this data sample, the k = 2 branch and the first coefficient set
of the branch will be activated, according to the description
in Table I. The operational complexity of the tree is also very
low because it only needs to perform at most D comparisons
before making the decision, where D is the maximum tree
depth and we have D = 3 for this example. The design of the
decision tree controller highly depends on the specific behavior
of the PA under test. An optimization procedure can be used to
determine the tree structure and the decision thresholds, to fit
the desired behavior, as described in detail in Section IV.
To validate the choice of classification model, we compare
three common models, including decision tree, support vector
machine (SVM), and k-nearest neighbor (KNN). The three
models were used with the proposed model switching method
in a forward modeling scenario. The training procedure in
Section IV was adopted, and the GMP model was used as
the basic model. The setup, test signal, and configuration for
decision tree were the same as the experimental setup for
PA 1 in Section V-A. SVM used the second-order polynomial
kernel and quadratic programming. KNN used ten neighbors
and Euclidean distance. The results are listed in Table II. The
accuracy was measured by normalized mean squared error
(NMSE). To save time, the training time was calculated by
using the first 10 000 training samples under ten iterations. The
test time refers to the time used to generate the predistorted
signal of 80 000 test data samples. Thus, while all methods
show similar modeling performance, decision tree has signifi-
cantly lower training and test time, which justifies our choice
of switch controller model.
D. Practical Implementation Considerations
In this new architecture, the hardware complexity and power
consumption can be minimized with careful arrangement in
1503
TABLE II
C OMPARISON OF D IFFERENT C LASSIFICATION M ETHODS
FOR M ODEL S WITCHING
Fig. 5. Hardware implementation of a switched model.
digital circuit design. In many cases, the hardware imple-
mentation of a DPD model is composed of two stages,
i.e., basis function generation and multiplication with model
coefficients. To reduce power consumption, as shown in Fig. 5,
the basis function generation blocks are adaptively turned
on/off, e.g., by using clock gating technique [29]. Special
attention may be required here to ensure that the selected basis
functions are built just in time when they are required. The
same control signal also decides the routing for the output
signals of basis functions. To realize coefficient switching,
the switch controller generates another control signal, which
is responsible for selecting the correct coefficient set. The
selected coefficients and basis functions can then multiply with
each other. Thus, the coefficient multiplier can be shared by
all cross-term branches. Moreover, while the required basis
function generation blocks are still implemented in the DPD
hardware, only one cross-term type is activated, so the average
power consumption is expected to be much lower than that
using a full-size conventional model.
Because of the flexibility of model formulation, the arrange-
ment for model terms can be conveniently adjusted for specific
application scenarios. In real-world applications, it is advisable
for the system engineers to design different model terms
that best suit individual use cases. For example, the leading
envelope cross terms in the GMP model [6] may also be used.
Different splitting feature formulations are also possible, as the
only requirement for them is that they need to be real-valued.
Moreover, the allocation of cross-term branches can be freely
adjusted, and the overlapping between different branches is
also allowed. For instance, one basis function can be assigned
to two branches simultaneously to achieve higher performance.
Also, if the number of switchable ranches is limited, different
GMP-type cross terms may be merged into a single branch.
Once the model structure is fixed, there may exist further
room to optimize hardware utilization. For example, if we
can switch among different GMP-type branches, hardware
1504 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MICROWAVE THEORY AND TECHNIQUES, VOL. 70, NO. 3, MARCH 2022
resources can be shared between the branches. As shown in
Fig. 2, all cross-term branches can share the same multi-
plier when performing the multiplication between x̃ n−m and
|x̃ n−m−l | p .
IV. T RAINING OF S WITCH C ONTROLLER
To achieve optimal performance, the decision tree model
of the switch controller needs to be jointly optimized with
the model coefficients for all operation modes. To solve
this optimization problem, an iterative alternate minimization
framework is adopted.
For initialization, we need to choose a mode for every input
data sample x̃ n . In this work, each data sample randomly
selects which cross-term branch to activate. The selection of
coefficient set is performed according to |x̃ n |. We uniformly
divide the range of |x̃ n | into T segments. The sample will
use the tth coefficient set if it belongs to the tth segment.
Thus, the input data are divided into K T groups, and we
collect the samples for each group into a vector xkt , where
k is the index for the activated cross-term branch. The index
of selected mode for the nth sample is denoted as rn .
With the initialized mode index, the optimization procedure
iterates between two main steps.
1) Optimize model coefficients and obtain the modeling
residue for all operational modes.
2) Optimize the decision tree model of switch controller.
In the first step, we estimate model coefficients with least
squares (LS) for all modes. In the r th mode, if it uses the kth
branch and the tth coefficient set, we have
 −1
H H
ckt = tk tk tk ykt (7)
where ckt is the model coefficients and ykt denotes the target
signal for input data xkt .  is built with all basis functions
of the used model and tk keeps the part related to activated
basis functions and selected samples of .
The modeling residue can be calculated by
ekt = y − k ckt (8)
where y includes all target signals and k is built using all
input data with the activated basis functions. Note that k
includes all rows and selected columns of . It is different
from tk used in (7), which uses selected rows and selected
columns.
Subsequently, in the second step, we train the switch
controller. Different from the previous step, the decision tree
controller is a classification model, so it is trained to produce
the target labels, i.e., the index of desired operation mode.
To find the target label for every input sample, we compare
the residue generated by all modes and select the mode that
results in the lowest modeling error. The mode index rn is then
updated to be the index of selected mode. The target label for
training the decision tree is formed by collecting all rn ’s into
a vector r.
The input data for training the tree are gathered in the
splitting feature matrix , where every column represents one
feature. As mentioned earlier, |x̃ n−m |’s are used as splitting
features in this work.
Algorithm 1 Training of Switch Controller
Input: , , y
Output: Decision tree model
1: Initialize mode index rn
2: repeat
3: for k = 1 to K do
4: for t = 1 to T do
5: Generate tk and ykt based on mode index rn
6: Estimate model coefficients with (7)
7: Calculate residue signal with (8)
8: end for
9: end for
10: for n = 1 to N do
11: Find mode with lowest modeling error and record the
index as rn
12: end for
13: Gather all rn into r
14: Decision tree model = fitctree(, r)
15: Update mode index rn to be the output of decision tree
model
16: until the error converge or maximum number of iterations
is reached
After preparing the training data  and r, the decision
tree can be trained using standard tree structure optimization
algorithms. In this work, the classification and regression
tree (CART) algorithm [28] is employed. In MATLAB, func-
tion fitctree can be used [30]. When the training is
completed, the mode index is updated using the model output
of decision tree for use in the next iteration.
Since the training is a nonlinear optimization process, the
system may converge to a local minimum. In that case, manual
tuning may be required. Nevertheless, based on our experience,
the algorithm can converge quickly within ten iterations in
most cases. The complete description is shown in Algorithm 1.
Finally, by applying (7) again, the model coefficients can be
optionally fine-tuned after the main algorithm. The training of
switch controller only needs to be conducted in the system
startup. During the real-time operation, the decision tree
controller can be kept unchanged unless the behavior of the
PA varies significantly. In this case, the model becomes linear
in the coefficients, and the adaptation complexity can thus be
reduced to the same level as that in conventional DPD models
using LS.
V. E XPERIMENTAL R ESULTS
A. Experimental Setup
To validate the model performance, a test platform was
set up, as shown in Fig. 6, which includes PC, signal gen-
erator, driver amplifier, PA, attenuator, and spectrum ana-
lyzer. Two in-house designed broadband gallium nitride (GaN)
Doherty PAs were used under test. The first PA operated
at 2.2 GHz with 36-dBm output power and 48% drain effi-
ciency [31], whereas the second PA operated at 3.5 GHz with
34-dBm output power and 42% drain efficiency [32]. The
excitation input signals were five-carrier 100-MHz orthogonal
LI et al.: REDUCING POWER CONSUMPTION OF DPD FOR RF PAs USING REAL-TIME MODEL SWITCHING
Fig. 6. Photograph of the DPD test bench.
TABLE III
C ROSS T ERMS U SED IN D IFFERENT M ODELS
frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) signals with 8-dB
peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR). The sampling rate
was 400 MHz. Recorded I/Q input and output samples were
time-aligned and normalized before training the model. The
model extraction was performed using a closed-loop estimator
in MATLAB. During the test, 80 000 samples were used for
model extraction and another set of 80 000 data points were
used for performance evaluation. In the DPD tests, we employ
both NMSE and adjacent channel power ratio (ACPR) as
performance metrics. In the complexity analysis, we fol-
low the same methodology as in [33] using the number of
floating-point operations per sample (FLOPs). The estimated
power consumption of the models on field-programmable gate
array (FPGA) is also reported.
In the experimental comparison, different model configura-
tions were considered, which are detailed in Table III. The
available cross terms include the GMP-type lagging cross
terms in (4) and two DDR-type cross terms in (5) and (6). The
proposed real-time model switching technique was applied
to two models, i.e., “GMP (all terms)” “GMP-DDR (all
terms).” The resulting models are referred to as “switched
GMP model” and “switched GMP-DDR model,” respectively.
In both situations, only one type of cross term was selected
for each data sample from all available terms. MP terms were
designated as fixed terms. Note that our configurations were
mainly used as a prototype to illustrate the effectiveness of the
proposed framework. In practice, the cross terms to be used
are not limited to the GMP and DDR types. Many other types
of cross terms can be used.
In the test, the polynomial order P = 2, memory depth
M = 5, and lagging envelope cross-term order L = 2 were
used for PA 1. For PA 2, the same parameters were used
except M = 4. For a fair comparison, the conventional models
also used multiple coefficient sets. The piecewise operation
1505
Fig. 7. Spectral results for different models using GMP-type cross terms
on PA 1.
was achieved using the magnitude-selective function [16]
with uniform segmentation. Both the proposed method and
conventional models used T = 6 segments. For the design of
decision tree, the maximum number of splits was set to 4K L
and the minimum leaf size was set equal to the number of
model basis functions. The minimum leaf size ensures that
enough data samples were used in the LS calculation.
B. Experimental Results on PA 1
The proposed DPD method was first compared with con-
ventional DPD methods on the first PA. Spectral results
using GMP models are shown in Fig. 7. In this comparison,
the conventional models with three different settings were
tested. The first model used the MP terms only, while the
other two models employed additional GMP-type cross terms.
It shows that the proposed switched GMP model achieved
a similar level of linearization performance as GMP model
with all terms and performed better than the conventional
model with similar complexity. It clearly demonstrates that the
model switching technique can effectively reduce the model
complexity with little compromise in accuracy.
We then present the results obtained with GMP-DDR mod-
els. In this comparison, we also tested the conventional models
with different settings. The spectral results are compared in
Fig. 8. It reveals that the switched GMP-DDR model achieved
better performance than the conventional models with similar
complexity. The detailed results of this case are given in
Table IV.
The AM–AM and AM–PM curves with and without the
switched GMP-DDR model are shown in Fig. 9. The spectral
and time-domain AM–AM results show that the PA exhibits a
significant memory effect, but the proposed method can still
offer good linearization performance.
Finally, we analyze the selection of different cross-term
branches. In Fig. 10, the selection of cross-term types for test
signals is displayed. It shows that the first GMP branch was
selected most often. It suggests that the GMP term branch
is most useful, which agrees with the comparison made in
Table IV. Moreover, as all branches are used, it validates our
earlier argument that different data samples are best suited to
1506 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MICROWAVE THEORY AND TECHNIQUES, VOL. 70, NO. 3, MARCH 2022
Fig. 8. Spectral results for different models using GMP- and DDR-type cross
terms on PA 1.
TABLE IV
P ERFORMANCE C OMPARISON FOR D IFFERENT M ODELS ON PA 1
Fig. 9. AM–AM and AM–PM characteristics with and without the switched
GMP-DDR model on PA 1.
different DPD model structures and justifies the improvement
of the proposed switching method.
C. Experimental Results on PA 2
The DPD test and experimental comparison were then
conducted on the second PA. Fig. 11 shows the spectral results.
It is shown that, by adopting the model switching techniques,
the modified model achieves comparable linearization perfor-
mance as the more complex full-size GMP model, which is
noticeably better than the conventional model with similar
complexity.
When the GMP-DDR model was used, the proposed method
also achieved excellent performance. The spectral results are
Fig. 10. Probability of selecting different cross-term branches on PA 1.
Fig. 11. Spectral results for different models using GMP-type cross terms
on PA 2.
Fig. 12. Spectral results for different models using GMP- and DDR-type
cross terms on PA 2.
shown in Fig. 12. The AM–AM and AM–PM curves in
this case are shown in Fig. 13. A detailed performance and
complexity comparison is drawn in Table V. The switched
GMP-DDR model again achieved better performance than the
conventional models with similar complexity. Actually, the
proposed method can even achieve similar NMSE and ACPR
performance as the full-size GMP-DDR model using less than
60% complexity.
The selection of cross-term branches in the GMP-DDR
model in this test is given in Fig. 14. We notice that the
distribution is very different from that in Fig. 10. In this case,
most data samples used DDR-2 terms. It again matches the
LI et al.: REDUCING POWER CONSUMPTION OF DPD FOR RF PAs USING REAL-TIME MODEL SWITCHING
TABLE V
P ERFORMANCE C OMPARISON FOR D IFFERENT M ODELS ON PA 2
Fig. 13. AM–AM and AM–PM characteristics with and without the switched
GMP-DDR model on PA 2.
Fig. 14. Probability of selecting different cross-term branches on PA 2.
comparison in Table V, which shows that the DDR-2 model
has better accuracy than DDR-1 and GMP models. Thus,
the results clearly demonstrate that the proposed method can
accurately identify the important cross terms. As the selection
is performed automatically during the training process, the
proposed method can bring more flexibility into the DPD
model.
D. Complexity and Power Consumption Analysis
To draw a more clear comparison of power consumption
between the proposed method and conventional DPD models,
we estimate the power consumption of the DPD block using
Xilinx Power Estimator [34]. The resource utilization is esti-
mated by counting the required resources for the IP cores of
the computational components, e.g., adders, multipliers, and
complex multipliers. The FPGA board employed was Virtex-7
XC7VX485T. Each I/Q sample of both input and output was
1507
TABLE VI
P OWER C ONSUMPTION C OMPARISON ON PA 1
TABLE VII
P OWER C ONSUMPTION C OMPARISON ON PA 2
kept as 32-bit data, where real and imaginary parts each had
16 bits. A 50% toggle rate and a 400-MHz sampling rate
are assumed for power estimation. For the proposed switched
model, the toggle rate of different cross-term branches is set
in accordance with the probability given in Figs. 10 and 14.
It is worth noting that the complexity comparison and power
estimation here are indicative and aim to show the relative
number/trend only. The absolute numbers and power consump-
tion depend on the specific model used and the actual circuit
implementation in real applications.
The comparison for both PAs is given in Tables VI and VII.
Compared with the full-size GMP-DDR models, the proposed
switched model used only around 60% DSP units and reduced
the power consumption by 40.4% and 38.3% for the two cases.
For reference, the results for using just one type of cross
term without switching are also listed. Thus, it shows that the
real-time model switching technique can greatly reduce the
required hardware utilization and power consumption while
maintaining comparable linearization performance.
VI. C ONCLUSION
In this article, we present a novel real-time model switching
approach to reduce the computational complexity of DPD
model implementation. By combining the cross-term switching
and coefficient switching techniques, the model can dynami-
cally select the most suitable cross terms and coefficient set for
every input data sample. The iterative alternate minimization
framework is also shown to be an effective method to optimize
the proposed DPD model. Therefore, by applying the proposed
method, the power consumption of DPD models can be greatly
reduced with little cost on performance.
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Yue Li (Member, IEEE) received the B.E. degree in
information engineering from Southeast University,
Nanjing, China, in 2016, and the Ph.D. degree
in electronic engineering from University College
Dublin (UCD), Dublin, Ireland, in 2020.
He is currently a Post-Doctoral Researcher with
the RF and Microwave Research Group, UCD. His
current research interests include behavioral model-
ing and digital predistortion for radio frequency (RF)
power amplifiers.
Xiaoyu Wang (Graduate Student Member, IEEE)
received the B.E. degree in information engineering
from Southeast University, Nanjing, China, in 2015.
She is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree at Uni-
versity College Dublin (UCD), Dublin, Ireland.
She is currently with the RF and Microwave
Research Group, UCD. Her current research focuses
on digital predistortion for radio frequency (RF)
power amplifiers, with a particular emphasis
on applications to multiple-input–multiple-output
(MIMO) systems.
Anding Zhu (Senior Member, IEEE) received
the Ph.D. degree in electronic engineering from
University College Dublin (UCD), Dublin, Ireland,
in 2004.
He is currently a Professor with the School
of Electrical and Electronic Engineering,
UCD. His research interests include high-
frequency nonlinear system modeling and device
characterization techniques, high-efficiency power
amplifier design, wireless transmitter architectures,
digital signal processing, and nonlinear system
identification algorithms.
Dr. Zhu is an elected member of MTT-S AdCom, the Chair of the Electronic
Information Committee, and the Vice-Chair of the Publications Committee.
He is also the Chair of the MTT-S Microwave High-Power Techniques
Committee. He served as the Secretary for MTT-S AdCom in 2018. He was
the General Chair of the 2018 IEEE MTT-S International Microwave
Workshop Series on 5G Hardware and System Technologies (IMWS-5G) and
a Guest Editor of the IEEE T RANSACTIONS ON M ICROWAVE T HEORY AND
T ECHNIQUES —Special Issue on 5G Hardware and System Technologies.
He is also an Associate Editor of the IEEE Microwave Magazine and a
Track Editor of the IEEE T RANSACTIONS ON M ICROWAVE T HEORY AND
T ECHNIQUES .