With 5G communication just around the corner, there is a rapidly increasing need for high-performance mm-Wave power amplifiers. However, these next-generation mm-Wave PAs are often expected to deliver nearly perfect performance. They should offer large output power to ensure sufficient link budget, broad bandwidth to support multi-standard communication or frequency reconfigurability/agility, high peak and back-off efficiency for energy saving, and also inherent linearity for Gbit/s complex modulations with minimum or even no digital pre-distortions (DPD). It is noteworthy that in conventional design notions a given PA design should simply take trade-offs among these performance aspects, instead of trying to achieve all of them. Interestingly, this somehow unreasonable quest for perfect mm-Wave PAs has recently stimulated a new wave of mm-Wave PA innovations at both circuit levels and architecture levels, which have substantially advanced the state of the art. In this talk, we will first present the design fundamentals of power amplifiers with an emphasis for wireless communication applications. The state of the art of mm-Wave PAs in different device technologies will be reviewed based on the "Georgia-Tech Power Amplifiers Performance Survey." We will next present several recent mm-Wave PA designs that feature various design techniques and innovations at both circuit-level (nonlinearity compensation, continuous-mode operations, broadband harmonic tuning) and architecture-level (such as Doherty and outphasing PAs). We will also showcase several mm-Wave PA/antenna co-design examples that exploit new antenna structures as a new design paradigm to further enhance mm-Wave PA output power and efficiency.

Biography:

Hua Wang is an associate professor at the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at Georgia Institute of Technology and the director of Georgia Tech Electronics and Micro-System (GEMS) lab. Prior to that, he worked at Intel Corporation and Skyworks Solutions on mm-Wave integrated circuits and RF front-end modules. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, in 2007 and 2009, respectively. Dr. Wang is interested in innovating mixed-signal, RF, and mm-Wave integrated circuits and hybrid systems for wireless communication, radar, imaging, and bioelectronics applications. Dr. Wang received the DARPA Young Faculty Award in 2018, the National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2015, the IEEE MTT-S Outstanding Young Engineer Award in 2017, the Georgia Tech Sigma Xi Young Faculty Award in 2016, the Georgia Tech ECE Outstanding Junior Faculty Member Award in 2015, and the Lockheed Dean's Excellence in Teaching Award in 2015. He held the Demetrius T. Paris Professorship from 2014 to 2018. His GEMS research group has won multiple best paper awards, including the IEEE RFIC Best Student Paper Awards (1st Place in 2014, 2nd Place in 2016, and 2nd Place in 2018), the IEEE CICC Outstanding Student Paper Awards (2nd Place in 2015 and 2nd Place in 2018), the IEEE CICC Best Conference Paper Award (2017), the 2016 IEEE Microwave Magazine Best Paper Award, the IEEE SENSORS Best Live Demo Award (2nd Place in 2016), as well as multiple best paper award finalists at IEEE conferences. Dr. Wang is an Associate Editor of the IEEE Microwave and Wireless Components Letters (MWCL) and a Guest Editor of the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits (JSSC). He is a Technical Program Committee (TPC) Member for IEEE ISSCC, RFIC, CICC, and BCICTS conferences. He is a Steering Committee Member for IEEE RFIC and CICC. He is a Distinguished Lecturer (DL) for the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society (SSCS) for the term of 2018-2019. He serves as the Chair of the Atlanta's IEEE CAS/SSCS joint chapter that won the IEEE SSCS Outstanding Chapter Award in 2014.