Benchmark of Cosimulation Methodologies for Digital Predistortion on IC Wideband Power Amplifiers

Exploring millimeter-wave bands presents fresh opportunities for new high data rates communication standards, yet confronts technological challenges like power amplification. Digital predistortion (DPD) offers a solution to enhance the linearity of the amplification while keeping high efficiency. Since Envelope Transient simulations (ET) are time-consuming during circuit design, designers often restort to experimental DPD verification instead. This paper proposes two co-simulation workflows to simulate modulated signals on Integrated Circuits (IC) Power Amplifiers (PA) with an application of DPD. Simulation results indicate that the computational modeling of power amplifiers enables 99% faster schematic and post-layout (PLS) ET simulations, reducing the time needed from months to minutes while maintaining comparable output accuracy.