RF circuit techniques for transition to 5G advanced

Worldwide adoption of 5G mobile devices has been one of the main driving engines behind semiconductor industry. Since the initial release in 2020, 5G-enabled devices have surpassed the market penetration of 3G/4G smartphones. 5G brings higher data capacity, low latency, and new applications. These are possible due to lower feature nodes such as FinFET 3 nm/5 nm but also due to improvements of the 5G radio frequency (RF)front-end circuitry. This paper presents 5G RF front-end architectures with novel circuits and measurement details which will be part of future 5G advanced and 6G mobile devices and are easier to be controlled using digital circuitry. The paper presents an envelope-controlled power amplifier (PA) principle, along with a novel simplified calibration architecture designed for 5G/5G+ operating under 6 GHz, as well as for frequency range 2 millimeter-wave PAs. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2023 53rd European Microwave Conference and was published in the Proceedings [Balteanu F, Thoomu K, Pingale A, Venimadhavan S, Sarkar S, Choi Y, Modi H, Drogi S, Lee J and Agarwal B (2023) Enabling RF circuit techniques for 5G and beyond In 53rd European Microwave Conference (EuMC), Berlin, Germany, 22–25].