Current Developments and Future Trends in Mobile Terminal Frontend Architectures
Sprache des Vortragstitels:
Englisch
Original Tagungtitel:
IEEE International Ultrasonics Symposium
Sprache des Tagungstitel:
Englisch
Original Kurzfassung:
The RF frontend is a crucial component of every mobile device requiring cellular communication capabilities. Usually consisting of antennas, switches, filters, duplexers and power amplifiers (PA) it consumes a sizeable part of the available PCB area and budget. Ever increasing requirements in number of supported bands and features drive a concurrent improvement need in both size and cost. The features driving front-end complexity are performance-enhancement measures like antenna-tuning or envelope-tracking (ET) for PA and carrier-aggregation (CA) for LTE.
This talk provides an overview of the state-of-the-art and some recent developments in mobile terminal front-end architectures, enabled by advancements in the frontend component area as well as improvements in cellular transceiver architectures. The different requirements in market segments like low-, mid- and high- tier are discussed and it is shown how this affects the implementation of the frontend. The introduction of CA in 3GPP Release 10 and thereby simultaneous radio operation in different frequency bands increases the complexity in the frontend considerable. Implementation of ET to lower the power dissipation of the PA for high crest-factor transmit signals creates specific issues in the frontend as well. The implications of CA and ET are analyzed and the impact to the frontend component specifications are shown.
In the final part of the presentation an outlook is provided how future technologies like MEMS or novel concepts like tunable filters and circulator-based frontend architectures could help to tackle some of the issues arising in mobile terminals due to ever increasing cost and miniaturization pressure and the steadily growing number of frequency bands and requirements driven by new 3GPP releases.
Sprache der Kurzfassung:
Englisch
Vortragstyp:
Hauptvortrag / Eingeladener Vortrag auf einer Tagung