Compact and Wideband Spatial Power Combining Module for mm-Wave High-Power Amplifiers
Licentiate thesis, 2020

The continued growth of data traffic in wireless communication applications demands to launch next-generation communication services at millimeter wave frequencies. Despite the obvious advantage of a large available spectrum, using millimeter wave bands is accompanied by many technological challenges. Mainly, this is due to the increased propagation and material loss, as well as limitations of the existing semiconductors, which deliver less power at these frequencies. The latter could be partly overcome by combining the power of multiple active devices on each antenna array element. However, conventional on-chip power combining networks have inherently high insertion losses, which significantly increase with the number of interconnected devices.

This work presents a novel power combining solution where an array of multiple power amplifiers (PAs) are interfaced to a single substrate integrated waveguide (to be integrated with an antenna element) in the context of high-power array transmitters. Its operation principle is based on the direct excitation of TEm0 modes by an array of electrically short and coupled microstrip lines. This allows one to directly excite waveguide modes with high power, and hence, realize a desired spatial power combing functionality, which obviates the need for a potentially lossy on-chip power combiners. The proposed structure has wide impedance bandwidth (50%) and low insertion losses (0.4 dB) while offers a small form-factor. Moreover, the insertion losses are virtually independent from the number of interfaced PAs in contrast to conventional power combining techniques. The work also evaluates the approximate scalability bounds of such a structure as well as discusses the critical effects of coupled non-identical PAs. These undesired effects are reduced by employing on-chip isolation load resistors, which make the proposed configuration comparable with the classic Wilkinson power combiner in terms of the sensitivity to a non-uniform excitation.

The direction of the ongoing work is a realization of a Watt-level PA, which combines power of multiple PA-cells integrated in the same compact module. For this purpose, a single cascode differential PA-cell is designed and implemented in a SiGe:C BiCMOS technology. It has a wideband performance (22—34 GHz) with both high efficiency (30%) and high output power (24.2 dBm), which outperforms the state-of-the-art single-cell silicon-based PAs.

integration,

array amplifiers

spatial power combining,

RFIC

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Opponent: Dr. Jonas Hansryd, Ericsson AB, Sweden

Author

Artem Roev

Chalmers, Electrical Engineering, Communication, Antennas and Optical Networks

Wide-Band Spatially Distributed TE10 Substrate Integrated Waveguide Transition for High-Power Generation at mm-Wave Frequencies

International Symposium on Antennas and Propagation (ISAP2017), Phuket, Thailand, 30 Oct. - 2 Nov., 2017,; (2017)

Paper in proceeding

Efficient Millimeter-Wave High Power Generation with Spatial Power-Combined Feeding Element

IEEE European Conference on Antennas and Propagation (EuCAP 2018), London, UK, 1 - 2 Apr., 2018,; (2018)

Paper in proceeding

Wideband mm-Wave Transition Between a Coupled Microstrip Line Array and SIW for High-Power Generation MMICs

IEEE Microwave and Wireless Components Letters,; Vol. 28(2018)p. 867-869

Journal article

N-way spatial power combining in SIW for high power generation MMICs-scalability bounds

2019 IEEE International Symposium on Antennas and Propagation and USNC-URSI Radio Science Meeting, APSURSI 2019 - Proceedings,; Vol. July 2019(2019)p. 1789-1790

Paper in proceeding

Roev, A., Maaskant, R., Matters-Kammerer, M.K., Ivashina, M. V. High power mm-wave spatial power combiner employing on-chip isolation resistors

Roev, A., Taghikhani, P., Maaskant, R., Fager, C., Ivashina, M. V. A wideband and low-loss spatial power combining module for mm-wave high-power amplifiers

Roev, A., Maaskant, R., Ivashina, M. V. Transition arrangement between an SIW structure and a transmission line arrangement

Silicon-based Ka-band massive MIMO antenna systems for new telecommunication services (SILIKA)

European Commission (EC) (EC/H2020/721732), 2016-09-01 -- 2020-08-31.

Areas of Advance

Information and Communication Technology

Subject Categories

Telecommunications

Communication Systems

Other Electrical Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Information Engineering

Driving Forces

Innovation and entrepreneurship

Publisher

Chalmers

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Online

Opponent: Dr. Jonas Hansryd, Ericsson AB, Sweden

More information

Latest update

11/26/2021