Experimental Investigation of Decoupling Effect on the Nonlinearity of Power Amplifiers in Transmitter Array

– In a practical compact massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) transmitter array, each antenna or subarray is connected to an independent power amplifier (PA) with a modest power capacity in order to avoid the challenging demand of high-power capacity of a single PA for the whole array and to facilitate the power dissipation of the transmitter array. In this case, there is simply not enough space for an isolator between the antenna and the PA. As a result, the array mutual coupling changes the load impedances of the PAs and thus further increases the MIMO transmitter’s nonlinearity. In this work, the decoupling effect on the transmitter array’s linearity is investigated experimentally by using an array prototype with PAs. The mutual coupling of the array can be effectively suppressed using a hybrid decoupling structure. Two continuous-wave (CW) signals at different frequencies are injected into the PAs, and the output signal of each PA is measured via a coupler. The measured results show that with effective mutual coupling reduction, the PA interference is greatly suppressed by up to 16 db and the amplitude of the desired signal is enhanced by up to 10 db.