🟦 Title: Switchable V-band Power Amplifier with Ultra-Fast Turn-On for Aggressive Duty-Cycling
🟨 Authors: Maximilian Gottfried Becker¹, Marco Gunia¹, Diego
Mendez², Frank Ellinger¹
¹TU Dresden, ²Pontificia Universidad Javeriana
Okay yeah my research work focuses on switchable power amplifiers for aggressive Duty cycling um to enable significant Energy savings so similar to a car start stop system at a traffic light the idea is to turn off a power amplifier as often as long as possible uh to reduce the energy
Consumption so in every time Gap we want to turn off the o data Gap we want to turn off the PA and in this particular work I’m investigating an integrated vband power amplifier so around 50 60 GHz and here we have a inverse Class E topology so quite conventional design
Based on uh known formulas but extended with some biing circuit I labeled Kickstarter here which first of all provides the ACT uh bias to the base but also uh speeds up the turn on phase by this uh two transistors here operating as a end gate with the inverter and a delay to create
A 150 PC pulse to uh quickly or for a short amount of time connect the base of this core transistor here to the supply voltage to speed up the turn on process and then when we measure this and for example look at the envelope output power we can see that the signal
Strength reaches the desired output power within 750 Picos seconds but there’s some additional settling time here unfortunately probably because we don’t have on ship termination and then the lab set up the enable signal causes some reflection for the turnoff period we also achieve aieve around 550 P
Seconds and this we can then use for aggressive Duty cycling uh maybe to Define this term the idea is to have a very short duty cycle interval so high Duty cycling frequency to minimize the latency so we can immediately react to new data and here
We have a very short active time in this example we only transmit for around 50 NS and here this turn on and turn off phase becomes relevant and here for the first time we measured the energy consumed in this time period here it’s around 100 PJ which we can then use for evaluating
How efficient this concept can be and yeah besides the usual continuous wave measurements uh we for the first time obtained or reported for such PA turn on time the energy consumed in such cycle and the idle power which becomes interesting if we are inactive for a long time