Switch-Type Modulators and PAs for Efficient

Transmitters in the 5G Wireless Infrastructure

Nikolai Wolff, Serguei Chevtchenko, Andreas Wentzel, Olof Bengtsson, and Wolfgang Heinrich
Ferdinand-Braun-Institut (FBH), Leibniz-Institut fuer Hoechstfrequenztechnik
Berlin, Germany
email: w.heinrich@ieee.org

Abstract—This paper discusses envelope-tracking solutions
for broadband mm-wave transmitters as required in future 5G
base stations. The unique feature is to use switch-type circuits
based on GaN devices in the modulators. Starting from state-of-
the-art results in the 2 GHz band, the potential of advanced
solutions for 30 GHz transmitters with bandwidths beyond 1
GHz is discussed. Both discrete-level class-G and class-S
modulators are considered.
Keywords—5G, envelope tracking, class-G, class-S, GaN power
amplifier.
I. INTRODUCTION
The power amplifier (PA) is still one of the most critical
hardware components in mobile communications transceivers.
The requirements combine specs on output power, energy
efficiency, and linearity, which are challenging to meet. This is
true for the handset as well as for the base station side, with
different implications. Today's spectrum-efficient modulation
schemes result in signals with high peak-to-average power
ratio (PAPR), which strongly degrades energy efficiency of
conventional PAs and has required introduction of advanced
solutions such as Doherty already in the present base-station
transmitters.
Moving towards 5G, the challenge is to cope with the
increased bandwidth and the higher carrier frequency while
maintaining efficiency, particularly when dealing with the new
mm-wave bands. Both, bandwidth and frequency are about a
factor of 10 larger than in the present 4G solutions. This cannot
be accomplished by simple scaling but needs a more
comprehensive development. The major part of research work
on efficiency enhancement so far has been devoted to the
Doherty approach, to envelope tracking (ET), and the
outphasing concepts. Among them, only the Doherty PA has
found widespread use in today's base stations, mainly because
it offers a simple plug-in solution for the existing base-station
architecture, while ET and outphasing require additional efforts
to provide the appropriate input signals. However, this is not a
prejudice for the 5G wireless infrastructure since new
transceiver architectures have to be developed anyway.
This situation is the motivation behind this paper. As the
starting point, a review of the state-of-the-art in broadband ET
in the 2 GHz band is presented. The results show that using
discrete levels for the supply voltage (often referred to as class-
G) outperforms continuous supply modulation for high
bandwidths. In this case, the modulator shrinks to a very fast
but simple multilevel switch. The available Schottky diodes
This work was supported by the German DFG under grant BE 5397/1-1
and by the Leibniz Association through the project "Digital Power Amplifier".
978-1-5386-1197-5/18/$31.00 ©2018 IEEE
and high-electron-mobility transistors (HEMTs) based on GaN
technology offer unprecedented high-speed power-switching
properties for this purpose and are the key components for the
success of this topology.
The results are used to extrapolate the potential one has for
5G mm-wave PAs in the 20…30 GHz band with bandwidths
of 1 GHz and more. As an alternative, the usage of a class-S
digital PA for the supply modulator is discussed. Both
approaches are based on switch-type modulators.
II. BROADBAND ENVELOPE TRACKING AT 2 GHZ
The conventional ET approach employs an analog
modulator to control the supply voltage of the RF PA. This
minimizes the difference between the envelope and the actual
supply voltage. However, the analog operation of the
modulator comes at the cost of power dissipation, particularly
if the envelope bandwidth grows. This can be improved if the
modulator is realized as a switch, which delivers only discrete
values of supply voltage, as illustrated in Fig. 1.
Fig. 1. Supply voltage against time for a simple class-G modulation with
three voltage levels (simplified presentation).
Our recent results (see [3]) document that the discrete-level
ET outperforms its continuous counterparts in terms of
bandwidth. 120 MHz of IQ bandwidth have been demonstrated
while previous conventional ET solutions (see [3] and [4])
cover only 80 and 20 MHz, respectively. The modulator has an
uncomplicated topology and consists of two GaN HEMTs and
two GaN Schottky diodes in the final stage (see Fig. 2), which
allows to address three voltage levels that can be chosen freely.
Although discretization results in increased voltage overhead
and accompanied energy dissipation (see grey areas in Fig. 1),
the corresponding degradation in overall efficiency remains
small, if the voltage levels are chosen properly, and it is more

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than compensated by the improvements due to the switch
operation of the transistors in the modulators.
Because the GaN HEMTs are available as n-channel
devices only, the floating source potential of the GaN-based
ET topology presents a problem for the gate driver. In our case,
isolated gate drivers with commercial digital isolators and
custom low-power DC-DC converters are applied, which
provide LVDS- and CMOS-compatible digital interfaces at the
driver input.
V3 V2 V1
discrete supply voltage
gate
driver D1 D2 V3
G //2
T1 T2 V2
S S V1
RF choke
RF input PA RF output
Fig. 2. The class-G system with three-level supply modulator according to
[1]: block diagram (top) and realized module (bottom).
A test signal with multiple OFDM-modulated carriers with
modulation bandwidths up to 20 MHz is used to highlight the
wideband capabilities. The signal covers an overall bandwidth
of 120 MHz and exhibits a peak-to-average power ratio
(PAPR) of 10 dB. The switch modulator supplies voltage
pulses in a range from 18 to 42 V with 2.5 ns minimum pulse
width. For the above test signal, the RF PA delivers a peak
power of 79 W (49 dBm) and is operated at an average output
power of 39 dBm. Since the variation of the supply voltage
causes changes in the gain and phase of the RF PA and, in turn,
nonlinear distortions, a DPD is used to restore linearity. The
overall PAE reaches 38.5%, accounting for both RF PA and
modulator. This represents an improvement of 13 percentage
points compared to the case with fixed supply voltage and is in
the same range as recent Doherty (DPA) data for comparable
PAPR ([5]: 45% drain efficiency at 33.9 dBm output power for
a 160 MHz bandwidth signal with 9.3 PAPR).
It is interesting to note that these results for a 120 MHz
signal are achieved at a minimum modulator pulse width of
2.5 ns, which corresponds to a maximum switching frequency
of 200 MHz only. Further investigations have shown that,
indeed, the maximum switching frequency of the modulator
does not need to exceed the bandwidth of the IQ signal, despite
the huge bandwidth expansion when going from the IQ to the
envelope signal [2]. The main bandwidth limitation of the
present module is due to the gate driver and its realization by
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commercial components. The design of the bias supply
network of the RF PA and the interconnect between the PA
and the modulator is critical and can cause severe degradations
in switching speed of the overall system.
III. EXTRAPOLATION TO THE 5G CASE AT 20…30 GHZ
Extending the ET solutions described before to the 5G
scenario in the mm-wave bands in the range 20…30 GHz with
multi-antenna arrays, one faces two main challenges:
• The efficiency of the RF PA with acceptable gain at peak
nominal power reduces from values around 60% to less
than 40%. This significantly compromises overall
efficiency.
• With IQ bandwidths of 1 GHz and more, modulator speed
must be increased by almost an order of magnitude
compared to the realizations so far. This has
consequences for final-stage transistors and diodes, but
also for the gate driver and the network between the
modulator and the output transistor of the mm-wave PA.
On the other hand, due to the MIMO concept, the typical
RF peak output power decreases from 80 W to less than 8 W.
This means that one can reduce the size (i.e., the gate width) of
the output transistor(s) in the RF PA accordingly. More
detailed considerations show that reducing the output power by
a factor of ten allows shrinking device size to 13%, which also
means that the PA needs less supply current. Hence, the final-
stage transistors and diodes in the modulator can be scaled
down as well, which relaxes the requirements regarding the
higher speed, at least partly.
12 50
Transducer Gain* (dB)
Drain Efficiency (%)
10 37.5
8 25
6 12.5
V = [8..28 V]
DS
4 0
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35
Output Power (dBm)
Fig. 3. Continuous-wave power sweep measurements for a 150nm GaN-
HEMT device with 600 µm gate width at 20 GHz for drain-source
supply voltages from 8 to 28 V.
Simulations based on the measured transistor data
presented in Fig. 3 and assuming a 20 GHz PA and an OFDM
modulated signal with 9 dB PAPR reveal a possible average
efficiency improvement by ET from 11.5% to 33.9%. At
2 GHz, an increase from 32% to 55% is expected. Since the
efficiency of a full system is the product of modulator and RF
PA efficiency, the requirements for the modulator are relaxed
in the 20 GHz case, since the RF PA is significantly less
efficient. At 20 GHz, an ET modulator with more than 34%
efficiency (the result of 11.5%/33.9%) could already improve
the system efficiency, while for the 2 GHz case more than 58%
(32%/55%) are needed.
 The following subsections elaborate on the details when
extending the class-G scheme used so far as well as when
considering a new modulator topology based on class-S.
A. Extending the Class-G Approach
Starting from the present realization with 200 MHz
switching frequency, the main limitations when targeting
2 GHz instead are expected to arise from the gate driver in the
modulator. It is not clear yet whether adopting latest CMOS
technology is enough to accommodate the required
combination of voltage swing and current, switching speed,
and energy efficiency. An alternative is to design a GaN-based
pre-driver stage, which would lower current and voltage specs
for the feeding CMOS circuitry.
Anyway, it will be mandatory in order to keep interconnect
parasitics low to realize at least the final modulator stage
together with the 30 GHz PA as GaN-MMIC on a single chip.
B. Class-S Approach
A further modulator solution can be developed based on the
class-S concept, which uses a digital amplifier and has shown
interesting results for pulse-modulated signals in the 1 GHz
range ([6]-[8]). The corresponding GaN chips represent
nothing else than fast switches, which can be used for various
purposes. Thus, when applying a suitable pulse coding at the
input and filtering at the output, they can be utilized for a GHz-
bandwidth modulator as well.
Fig. 4 illustrates the concept. The envelope information is
encoded in a binary pulse scheme, which is amplified by the
digital PA. Its output signal reproduces the continuous
envelope signal after low-pass filtering. This filter can be
integrated in the bias network of the RF PA. By tailoring the
coding scheme and the filter approach, a variety of solutions
becomes possible with the same digital PA. These degrees of
freedom can be exploited in order to optimize bandwidth and
efficiency.
Fig. 4. ET scheme with class-S supply modulator.
Since digital PAs with switching speeds compatible to GHz
signals are already available [8], the main challenge is to
realize high energy efficiency within the ET scheme.
Particularly, while the current class-S solutions deal with
narrowband signals around 1 GHz carrier frequency, in ET the
modulator has to generate signals with a spectrum from DC to
1 GHz, which requires principally different pulse code
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schemes. However, given the experience with the class-S
modulators so far ([9]), this should be feasible with reasonable
efforts.
As for the class-G approach, the resulting ET system needs
to be integrated on a single GaN die.
IV. CONCLUSIONS
This paper discusses the potential of the ET concept for 5G
base-station solutions in the 20…30 GHz frequency range. In
contrast to the conventional way, advanced realizations are
employed based on switch-type modulators, which have shown
state-of-the-art broadband results in the 2 GHz range. GaN
technology is expected to accommodate the required
performance in terms of power and speed and lends itself to
monolithic integration of the most critical circuit parts, the RF
PA and the modulator final stage(s).
The switch concept allows for great flexibility in
optimizing the performance. Most challenging for the required
GHz bandwidths are energy-efficient floating gate drivers for
the GaN transistors. Still unexplored is the question whether
acceptable ACLR values can be reached with small-scale
DPDs or even without any digital linearization, since the power
consumption of the DPD is prohibitive for many MIMO 5G
transceivers presently under discussion.
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