Boosting Efficiency in Mm-Wave III-V Power Amplifiers

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Several mass market applications are emerging in mm-wave bands, including 5G, satcom and mobile infrastructure (backhaul). The need for efficient power amplifiers is even more felt at these frequencies given an increased complexity of the transmitters (active arrays); this is in contrast with the intrinsic difficulty of designing at mm-wave frequencies. Moreover, efficient power amplifier design must rely on accurate waveform engineering whose feasibility at mm-wave frequencies is still unexplored.III-V technologies have the potential of offering a boost in terms of performance compared to Si-based amplifiers. However, at mm-wave frequencies, a better understanding of non-linear operation in terms of waveforms is key in enabling more sophisticated design techniques as well as feeding-back to the transistor design o optimise operation.The Centre for High Frequency Engineering at Cardiff University has recently acquired a £1.4m harmonic load-pull characterisation system with 110 GHz bandwidth and waveform measurement capability. The idea is to exploit the system to characterise, compare and model mm-wave transistors samples provided by Qorvo (GaAs and GaN). This will enable to explore and define the best power amplifier design technique to achieve high efficiency, as well as understanding how the devices can be improved to improve the performance. The technique developed will be tested on MMIC designs on GaAs and GaN.