Towards Gigabit per Second: Evolution of Mobile Terminal Front-End and Transceiver Architectures

Description

With mobile communication modems poised to crack the Gigabit-per-second barrier, the requirements for the cellular radio front-end and the transceivers are steadily driven towards higher complexity: More bands and more bandwidth, concurrent operation in several of these, more MIMO layers, and higher order modulation trending towards 256QAM (and beyond?). This quickly increasing complexity stresses the implementation of the radios since PCB area and power envelope are highly constrained in mobile phones and thus components need to shrink and the power dissipation per function must decrease. Therefore, new concepts are needed in front-end design as well as transceiver architectures. In this presentation, the current radio implementations are reviewed and the resulting challenges discussed. For the path towards Gbps modems the options for the realization of advanced features are investigated, looking into further scaling-up of current approaches or the implementation of new ideas to tackle challenges like 4-band downlink carrier aggregation, 100MHz of contiguous bandwidth, uplink carrier aggregation progressing from continuous intra-band to inter-band, and the inclusion of new frequency bands reaching from 600MHz all the way up to 6GHz.

Period	09 Jun 2017
Event title	IEEE International Microwave Symposium
Event type	Conference
Location	United StatesShow on map