The Impact of RF Front-End Characteristics on the Spectral Regrowth of Communications Signals

摘要

The nonlinear characteristic of an RF front-end results in in-band distortion and spectral regrowth of digitally modulated signals with distortion being dependent on the statistical variation of the signal. In this paper, the interaction of the nonlinear response with the signal is explored using a time-averaged autocorrelation analysis applied to several limiter-amplifier models having characteristics ranging from soft-to-hard amplitude limiting. The analysis is verified by comparing measured and predicted adjacent channel power rejection for a code-division multiple-access amplifier.