A New LINC Transceiver’s Architecture for Wireless Radio Systems

This paper proposes a new LInear amplification system using Nonlinear Components (LINC) transceiver that utilizes a modified LINC architecture. The drawbacks of the conventional LINC transmitter, which are related to the power efficiency loss due to the analog radio frequency (RF) signal recombination at the LINC output stage, are avoided by combining the decomposed LINC signals digitally at the receiver. Simulation results using a commercial amplifier with a Raleigh fading channel and 802.11a signal demonstrated an obvious improvement of the power efficiency. It increased from 3.9% for regular LINC to 15.5% for the modified LINC system. The quality of the signal was not degraded, as the error vector magnitude metric was kept below 2% at the receiver, which is much lower than the standard requirements.