Mitigating Thermal and Power Limitations to Enable 5G

3GPP has defined 5G-NR with a modulation that inherently reduces energy efficiency of linear transmitters. This causes thermal problems from the dissipated power, which is a particular difficulty for massive-MIMO arrays. Temperature rise from transmitter power dissipation limits the array size that can be safely built. Achieving the multiple business objectives for 5G installations requires solving this problem, and using Sampling technologies is showing great promise to meeting this goal. This presentation presents the physical basis of this thermal problem, and shows how the sampling operation of the switch-mode mixer modulator (SM3) solves not only the thermal problem but also how, using the SM3, signal bandwidth efficiency is increased to 14 bits per symbol (16,384-QAM) with modulation within 0.5% of ideal.