Performance of the Volterra behavioral model for wideband amplifiers

In this article, we test the performance of a Volterra behavioral model for wideband amplifiers, which has been theoretically developed based on the frequency dependence knowledge of the nonlinear transfer functions. Relying on a simple measurement setup, a commercial driver amplifier has been extensively characterized at 915 MHz and modeled by using a WCDMA‐like probing signal at different power levels. The calculated values of the normalized mean square error (NMSE) versus the model memory length were compared with a standard memory polynomial (MP) model. To assess the accuracy of the model with other modulation formats, parameters extracted with the WCDMA‐like signal were used to predict the response for a 2‐MHz‐wide GSM‐like signal. For each memory length, the NMSE was calculated again and compared with the corresponding MP model. In all tested cases, results show that the proposed model exhibits a better performance even in the range of memory lengths, where both the models have a very similar number of coefficients. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 51: 2166–2169, 2009; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/mop.24542