Millimeter Wave Power Amplifiers: State of the Art and Future Technology Trends Slides

With 5G communication just around the corner, there is a rapidly increasing need for high-performance mm-Wave power amplifiers (PA). However, these next-generation mm-Wave PAs are often expected to deliver nearly “perfect” performance. They should offer large output power to ensure sufficient link budget, broad bandwidth to support multi-standard communication or frequency reconfigurability/agility, high peak and back-off efficiency for energy saving, and also inherent linearity for Gbit/s complex modulations with minimum or even no digital pre-distortions (DPD). It is noteworthy that in conventional design notions a given PA design should typically take trade-offs among these performance aspects. Interestingly, this somehow unreasonable quest for “perfect” mm-Wave PAs has recently stimulated a new wave of mm-Wave PA innovations at both circuit levels and architecture levels in recent years. In this webinar, we first review the state of the art of mm-Wave PA technologies and identify the technology trends based on the "Power Amplifiers Performance Survey 2000-Present" by research group at Georgia Tech. Next, we present several recent mm-Wave PA designs that feature various innovations at both circuit-level and architecture-level. We will also showcase several mm-Wave PA/antenna co-design examples that exploit this new design paradigm to further enhance mm-Wave PA output power and efficiency.