Abstract
Gallium nitride integrated technology is very promising not only for wireless applications at mobile frequencies (below 6 GHz) but also for network backhaul radiolink deployment, now under deep revision for the incoming 5G generation of mobile communications. This contribution presents three linear power amplifiers realized on 0.25 μ m Gallium Nitride on Silicon Carbide monolithic integrated circuits for microwave backhaul applications: two combined power amplifiers working in the backhaul band around 7 GHz, and a more challenging third one working in the higher 15 GHz band. Architectures and main design steps are described, highlighting the pros and cons of Gallium Nitride with respect to the reference technology which, for these applications, is represented by gallium arsenide.
Highlights
The constantly growing demand of high data rates of today’s communication systems drives us towards the adoption of high spectral efficient digital modulation schemes posing severe channel linearity constraints on all the transceiver building blocks
Considering the device power density of 4.5 W/mm for 30 V drain bias of the process and accounting for the network losses, two 8 × 75 μm Gallium Nitride (GaN) HEMTs have been combined with a resulting total periphery of 1.2 mm
The adopted system-level characterization set-up includes an arbitrary waveform generator (AWG) that generates the microwave modulated signal, a receiver based on a vector signal analyzer (VSA), and a workstation (PC) for the elaboration of the data
Summary
The constantly growing demand of high data rates of today’s communication systems drives us towards the adoption of high spectral efficient digital modulation schemes posing severe channel linearity constraints on all the transceiver building blocks. For microwave backhaul, where power levels do not exceed dozens of Watts, the adoption of complex linearizers with high impact on the overall power budget is not always feasible, making the linearity of the PA alone very important [3]. For these cases, to keep the PA linearity at an acceptable level, the solution of choice is the class AB PA, that represents a reasonable trade-off between linearity, efficiency and bandwidth [2].
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