A 74W/48V Monolithic-GaN Integrated Adjustable Multilevel Supply Modulator for 5G Base-Station Massive-MIMO Arrays

Efficient power management for RF power amplifiers (PAs) is emerging as a critical requirement for the development and adoption of next-generation wireless communication systems. To achieve higher transmitter efficiency, envelope tracking (ET) using supply modulators (SM) is widely used in today's systems. However, the demands for high bandwidth, complex modulation and multiple access schemes in 5G and upcoming 6G systems have exposed serious limitations of analog ET (AET) that get worse in high-power high-voltage applications, e.g., base-station transmitters. As a promising alternative to AET, digital envelope tracking (DET) has proven its advantages and capabilities to support various signal bandwidths and power profiles [1]–[8]. DET architectures in Figure 9.3.1 achieve higher efficiency by separating the voltage generation (VG) stage and tracker (TR) stage, in which the former aimed for relatively slow but efficient generations of multiple voltage levels and the latter for fast voltage tracking.