IEEE Solid-States Circuits Magazine - Spring 2020 - 119

Prof. Hua Wang's Lecture Series on Millimeter-Wave Power
Amplifiers Draws Great Interest Worldwide

Prof. Hua Wang from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, has served
as a Distinguished Lecturer (DL) for
the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society
(SSCS) for the past two years and
given a series of lectures on millimeter-wave (mm-wave) power amplifiers (PAs) that was well received
within the SSCS as well as the IEEE
Microwave Theory and Techniques
Society (MTT-S). He has been in--
vited to many Chapter meetings,
where large audiences from local
industry and academia attended and
has also given invited lectures on
the topic at conferences and at universities worldwide.
In Dallas, Texas, his presentation,
"Broadband, Linear, and High-Efficiency mm-Wave Power Amplifiers-
The Unreasonable Quest for 'Perfect'
5G mm-Wave Power Amplifiers and
Some Reasonable Solutions," was
given jointly to Dallas SSCS and MTT-S
Chapter members, attracting more
than 65 attendees. These included students and professors from local academia as well as industry professionals
from Qorvo, Raytheon, Texas Instruments, PHAZR, GlobalFoundries, and
others. His well-received lecture, with
detailed explanations on theory and
real applications, was complemented
by many questions from the interested audience. The seminar material
surveyed publications from various
researchers, including the latest developments from Wang's team.
The seminar highlighted that, with
5G deployments becoming a reality,
there is an increasing need for highperformance mm-wave PAs, which are
to deliver nearly perfect performance,
i.e., high-output power to ensure sufficient link budget, a broad bandwidth
to support multistandard communications and frequency reconfiguDigital Object Identifier 10.1109/MSSC.2020.2987295
Date of current version: 24 June 2020

Prof. Hua Wang's lunchtime seminar for Dallas SSCS and MTTS Chapter members.

rability/agility, high efficiency at
both peak power and backoff, and
high linearity to accommodate wideband complex modulations with
minimum or no digital predistortion.
This unreasonable quest for "perfect"
mm-wave PAs, where these various
aspects of performance are typically
traded off with one another, has stimulated a new wave of innovations at
both the circuit and architecture levels, substantially advancing the state
of the art.
The talk surveyed recent mm-wave
PA designs that feature various tech--
niques and innovations at both the
circuit (nonlinearity compensation,
continuous-mode oper-a tions, and
broadband harmonic tuning) and
architecture (e.g., Doherty and outphasing PAs) levels. It also showcased several mm-wave PA/antenna
codesign examples that exploit new
antenna structures as a new design
paradigm to further enhance the
performance and efficiency of mmwave transmitters.
The long list of locations where
Wang has given DL talks during the
last two years also includes Austin,
Texas; San Diego, California; the
United Kingdom; Ireland; and Japan.
Wang also gave inv ited talks in
Israel, at both the IEEE International
Conference on Microwaves, Communications, Antennas, and Electronic
Systems (COMCAS) 2019 in Tel Aviv
as well as the Israel Institute of

Prof. Wang (right) hosted by Prof. Emanuel
Cohen in Israel.

Technology (Technion), where he was
hosted by his former colleague from
Intel, Prof. Emanuel Cohen.
During his invited talk at COMCAS 2019, "Broadband, Linear, and
High-Efficiency mm-Wave PAs in
Silicon-Overcoming Device Limitations by Architecture/Circuit Innovations," among the many innovations
presented was a meticulous survey
done by Wang's group illustrating the many accomplishments and
publications of mm-wave PAs, in--
cluding the Georgia Tech Power Am--
plified Survey.
His talks have been attended by
many well-known experts in the field
from around the world, including
Prof. Zoya Popovic from the University of Colorado Boulder, Prof. Jeff
Walling from the University of Utah
(now with Qualcomm), and Prof. Ted
Rappaport from New York University,
who had commented that Wang has

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