Patent ID: 7899414

Claim:
A method for power control of a plurality of power amplifiers used for transmit beamforming, the method comprising: determining that a packet of information is to be transmitted; weighting each of a plurality of digital baseband transmit signals with a corresponding one of a plurality of transmit weights to produce a plurality of digital weighted signals representing the packet of information; converting each of the plurality of digital weighted signals to a corresponding analog signal and then to a corresponding radio frequency signal to produce a plurality of radio frequency signals; supplying each of the radio frequency signals to a corresponding one of a plurality of power amplifiers that amplify the corresponding radio frequency signal; supplying each of the radio frequency signals to a corresponding one of a plurality of self-bias boosting circuits associated with corresponding ones of the plurality of power amplifiers, wherein each self-bias boosting circuit biases the corresponding power amplifier according to a level of the corresponding radio frequency signal supplied to it; amplifying each of the radio frequency signals with a corresponding one of the plurality of power amplifiers for simultaneous transmission; and updating the transmit weights on a per-packet basis.