Professional Documents
Culture Documents
I. INTRODUCTION
The phenomena known as Reverse IMD occurs as the
result of unwanted signals entering an amplifier through its
output port and beating with the main signal in the amplifier
to produce unwanted spectral products. Reverse IMD can
cause major problems when multiple high power transmitters
are located in the same area. The resulting IMD products can
cause interference at a receiver even though the main signals
are filtered out of the receiver. It also can be the source of
error in measurements of non-linearity.
Despite the
importance of this effect, there has been little published on
Reverse IMD and no systematic studies [1]. This paper
investigates the sources of Reverse IMD and develops
techniques for mitigating the resulting distortion.
This work was conducted in the L-band frequency range,
but should be applicable to other frequency bands. A variety
of different power amplifiers (PAs), all normally biased class
AB, were evaluated for Reverse IMD and compared in
performance. The PAs evaluated included 200 watt GaN and
LDMOS solid-state power amplifiers (SSPAs) and lower
power GaAs SSPAs, a bipolar SSPA and a traveling wave
tube amplifier (TWTA).
Interferer, C2
IMD
Main, C1
53
PAWR 2011
Fig. 5 200 watt LDMOS SSPA Reverse IMD (coupling 40-50 dB).
54
(1)
55
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
56