Fujitsu Limited and Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd. announced the development of a GaN high-electron mobility transistor (HEMT) power amplifier for use in W-band (75-110 GHz) transmissions. This can be used in a high-capacity wireless network with coverage over a radius of several kilometers.
In areas where fiber-optic cable is difficult to lay, to achieve high-speed wireless communications of several gigabits per second, one promising approach is to use high-frequency bands, such as the W band, which uses a wide frequency band. In order to get good long-distance coverage in these frequencies, however, it is necessary to increase the output power of the power amplifier to the scale of watts.
Fujitsu succeeded in developing a power amplifier for W-band transmissions using GaN-HEMT technology capable of high output at 100 GHz. Evaluations of the newly developed power amplifier confirmed it to have 1.8 times increased output performance than before, which would translate to an increase of over 30% in transmission range when used in a high-speed wireless network.
A portion of this research was conducted as part of a project of the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) on "Agile Deployment Capability of Highly Resilient Optical and Radio Seamless Communication Systems." Details of this technology were presented at Power Amplifiers for Wireless and Radio Applications (PAWR2016), in Austin, Texas.
