New Industry Products

GaN enables Ultra Wide-Band Linearized Doherty Amplifier

January 11, 2018 by Paul Shepard

Mitsubishi Electric US, Inc. will present a hands-on mini lab showcasing its high-efficiency, wide-band GaN Doherty Amplifier at Radio Wireless Week (RWW2018), which will be held January 15-16 at the Hyatt Regency Orange County, Garden Grove, California.

Mitsubishi Electric Corporation and Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, Inc. presented a paper  titled "3.0-3.6 GHz Wideband, over 46% Average Efficiency GaN Doherty Power Amplifier with Frequency Dependency Compensating Circuits," at last year's Radio Wireless Week describing this wide-band Doherty power amplifier design technique for next generation LTE base stations using GaN transistor technology.

The demonstration at RWW2018 will further illustrate the ability to linearize an ultra-wideband signal applied to Mitsubishi Electric's GaN power amplifier using an advanced pre-distortion technique provided by NanoSemi, Inc.

"The proliferation of smartphones and tablets will require a dramatic increase in wireless capacity of base stations. To meet this demand, mobile technologies are moving to next generation LTE in which the wireless capacities are increased by allocating multiple simultaneous frequency bands (carrier aggregation) above 3GHz," said Kyle Martin, VP and General Manager, Mitsubishi Electric US, Inc. Semiconductor Division.

"Operating in multiple simultaneous frequency bands usually requires multiple power amplifiers to cover each frequency band, leading to an increase in the size of base stations," continued Martin.

(click on image to enlarge)

Conventional base station Doherty power amplifier design presents many challenges to simultaneously achieve both high efficiency and low distortion for wide-band carrier aggregation.

Using NanoSemi, Inc.'s digital pre-distortion (DPD) technology, Mitsubishi Electric's wide-band Doherty power amplifier can achieve high efficiencies with up to 200MHz instantaneous bandwidth while maintaining ACLR of -50dBc.  With this breakthrough, base station designers gain the ability to design a single flexible LTE power amplifier capable of many carrier aggregation scenarios, even above 3GHz.

RWW2018 attendees are invited to stop by the Mitsubishi Electric US booth 201/300 at RWW2018 for more information and to view the latest GaN technology in action.