Advanced Techniques for Radio Transmitters

Brought to you by The Radio Technology Group

Digital pre-distortion and envelope tracking seem at last to have caught up with the needs of LTE handsets; but techniques such as new LTE carrier types, carrier aggregation, and uplink MIMO are also coming down the track to render these techniques potentially obsolete.

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About the event

What transmitter techniques will be available to the designers of the next generation of products; and how will they address the problems of efficient amplification, handling multi-carrier signals, duplexing, and efficient matching to multiple antennas? This Cambridge event is kindly sponsored by Rohde and Schwarz and CSR.

As fast as technologies make efficient and cheap power amplifiers for radio terminals and infrastructure advances, the requirements from the standards seem to leap forward. Digital pre-distortion and envelope tracking seem at last to have caught up with the needs of LTE handsets; but techniques such as new LTE carrier types, carrier aggregation, and uplink MIMO are also coming down the track to render these techniques potentially obsolete!

This event will explore this subject, including topics such as advanced envelope tracking; transmitter circuit architectures such as Doherty and Chireix; the application of digital and analogue pre-distortion; efficient, combining and duplexing techniques for terminals and small cells; tuning techniques; drive architectures for multiple antennas and bands; in applications such as MIMO, beam-forming, and carrier aggregation. It will include contributions from companies promoting the latest technologies as well as academic contributions on the latest research and fundamental limits.

You can follow @CambWireless on Twitter and tweet about this event using #CWRadioTech.

Sponsored by Rohde and Schwarz

Rohde & Schwarz is one of the world's leading manufacturers of information and communications technology products for professional users.

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Sponsored by Qualcomm Technologies International

Qualcomm Technologies Inc is the world leader in next-generation mobile technologies.

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Agenda

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The information supplied below may be subject to change before the event.

11:45

Registration & Networking over lunch

12:45

Introduction to the Cambridge Wireless Radio Technology SIG from Diego Giancola of PA Consulting Group

12:55

Welcome from sponsor Hamid Ahmadi, Vice President & Chief Innovation Officer, CSR

13:00

Welcome from sponsor Steve Edwards, Marketing and T&M Sales Manager, Rohde & Schwarz

13:05

System-level implications of 802.11 Transmit Beamforng; Swaroop Venkatesh, Director, Systemims Architecture, CSR

The talk provides an overview of 802.11 transmit beamforming technology, followed by an outline of ts impact on the design of 802.11 PHY and MAC layers.

13:35

Q&A

13:40

Potential of in-band full duplexing for future wireless systems; Alain Mourad, Wireless Specialist, InterDigital Europe Ltd

Recent advances in self-interference cancellation have opened the door for in-band full duplexing to become a real disruptive technology candidate for future wireless systems. Not only the technology promises up to 2x link spectral efficiency compared to half-duplex TDD and FDD, it also offers multiple other benefits such as reduced air interface latency, improved MAC efficiency, UL/DL decoupling, better trunking efficiency and spectrum sharing. Although significant progress has been made recently for the technology development, there is still a number of challenges that need to be tackled before the technology graduates for adoption in the forthcoming next generation wireless standards (e.g. 5G). This talk will give an introduction to the in-band full duplexing and highlight its potential benefits and challenges for future wireless systems.

14:10

Q&A

14:15

Challenges for Power Amplifier Testing with Envelope Tracking - concepts, pit falls, state of the art and trends; Rainer Lenz, Product Manager, Rohde & Schwarz

Mobile devices have become an important tool in our everyday life. We want to use them everywhere and all the time, unfortunately operation time is limited by battery capacity. During the recent years, mobile devices have made more and more use of all broadband access technologies which tend to consume a lot of battery capacity. In order to offer longer operation times, energy saving techniques have drawn the attention of all major chipset manufacturers. One of the key technologies is envelope tracking. This talk will have a look at the basic concepts of envelope tracking and will focus on the challenges which evolve once the design needs to be tested against its specifications - starting from required performance of the measurement equipment throughout the concepts for measuring all the required parameters of power amplifiers with Envelope Tracking Technology. A brief outlook will be given on what might be required in the future to keep pace with the latest trends in the wireless community.

14:45

Q&A

14:50

Coffee/Tea & Networking

15:20

Envelope Tracking – fuel injection for the RF Front End; Jeremy Hendy, VP Marketing, Nujira

The presentation will introduce ET technology, explain how it overcomes the energy efficiency penalty introduced when transmitting advanced high data-rate waveforms with high PAPR, how it extends to MIMO systems, and how ET can ultimately enable single-chip CMOS integration.

15:50

Q&A

15:55

Programmable Wideband PA with Digital Pre-Distortion for High Efficiency; Chris Clifton, Chief Technology Officer & Technology Office Director, Sony SES

We will be discussing a wideband PA (700-3800MHz) PA which can be programmed digitally to meet the requirements for software defined radio architectures. A number of approaches for improving efficiency over the whole operating region will be presented and discussed together with the use of simulation techniques.

16:25

Q&A

16:30

Digital Pre-distortion – Transmitter System Engineering and Optimisation; Richard Hewitt, Co-founder and CTO, Systems4Silicon

Digital Pre-distortion (DPD) has been widely researched, however the papers don’t contain the whole story or how to design a practical system. This talk will unearth some of the key engineering decisions that face today’s transmitter system engineer when incorporating DPD and the challenges for DPD as transmit bandwidths increase.

17:00

Q&A

17:05

Panel Session with all speakers chaired by SIG Champion, Gerald Miaille of CSR

18:05

Event closes Please Fill in Evaluation Forms

Speakers

Chris Clifton - CTO & Divisional Director:Europe based Sony Semiconductor & Electronic Solutions (SES), Sony Europe B.V.

Chris is the Chief Technology Officer and Divisional Director for Europe based Sony Semiconductor and Electronic Solutions (SES) with responsibilities for new technology/product incubation and telecommunication/semiconductor R&D activities. His main mission is to identify and help accelerate the development of core enabling technologies which will underpin future consumer and industrial electronic products. Current research focus areas include 3GPP related technologies which will pave the way towards the 5G era including the wireless M2M connectivity technologies which will underpin the next IoT revolution. He currently serves on the ETSI board.

A significant period of his time at Sony has been spent managing the Wireless Semiconductor Development activity in Basingstoke, joining the Sony Semiconductor operation in 1997. During this time the company succeeded in securing significant design wins in the European cellular phone market. After spending a period of time at the main development site in Atsugi, Japan, the design flow for the GaAs MMIC technology was transferred to the UK Design Centre so that European products could be designed locally.

Following the successful set-up of the MMIC design facility by Chris and his team, other areas of Mixed-Signal development were expanded at the Basingstoke facility including cellular RF transceivers, full Bluetooth chipset solutions and analogue devices for DTV applications, under his leadership. In 2001, he became Divisional Director for Wireless products within the European Development Centre.

In 2006, Chris launched a local design centre for the development of LCD panels for mobile consumer electronics devices. Since this time, he has maintained a strong interest in display and image capture technologies, in addition to several other strategically important microelectronic technologies such as MEMS.

Prior to Sony, he held positions as Chief Design Engineer at the GEC III-V semiconductor facility at Caswell and RF Engineering Manager at DSC Communications.

As well as being a member of the Institute of Electrical Engineers (IEE) and Chartered Engineer (CEng), Chris has served on the boards of a number of UK government bodies covering training and promotion of engineering within the UK. Also a member of the UK Strategy Advisory board for 5GIC (5G Innovation Centre at Surrey University).

He has authored more than 20 international publications and holds a number of patents. Academic qualifications include a BSc(Hons) in Physics and a PhD in Electronic Engineering.

 

Richard Hewitt - Chief Technology Officer, Systems4Silicon

Richard Hewitt is co-founder and CTO at Systems4Silicon and has over 25 years’ experience directly at the coal-face of wireless engineering. Richard helped to develop one of the first practical software designed radios for Racal and went on to HP-Labs, conducting early research into spread-spectrum for 3G and the use of OFDM for 802.11. More recently, he enjoys the engineering diversity of design service provision and the multi-disciplinary challenge posed by digital pre-distortion.

Rainer Lenz - Product Manager, Rohde and Schwarz

Rainer Lenz studied electrical engineering at the University of Karlsruhe (TH) where he got his Dipl.-Ingdegree and his PhD degree. After his studies, he worked several years in RF engineering and in system engineering. After that, he joined Rohde & Schwarz GmbH & Co. KG in Munich as product manager for signal generators and power meters.

Alain Mourad - Senior Director, InterDigital Europe

Dr Alain A.M. Mourad holds a PhD degree in Telecommunications from ENST Bretagne in France. He has over 15 years’ experience in the wireless systems industry. He is currently leading the research and development of Next Generation Radio Access Networks at InterDigital International Labs (London, Berlin, Seoul). Prior to joining InterDigital, Dr. Mourad was a Principal Engineer at Samsung Electronics R&D (UK) and previously a Senior Engineer at Mitsubishi Electric R&D Centre Europe (France). Throughout his career, Dr. Mourad has been active in the research and standardization of recent communication networks (5G/4G/3G) and broadcasting systems (DVB/ATSC). He has held various leadership roles in the industry, invented over 40 granted patents and several other patent applications, and authored over 50 peer-reviewed publications. He received the Inventor of the Year Award from Samsung Electronics R&D (UK) twice in 2012 and 2013, and in 2016 InterDigital Innovation Award for the “idea, creation, and execution of InterDigital Europe”.

SIG Champions

Mark Beach - Professor of Radio Systems Engineering, University of Bristol (Communication Systems & Networks Research Group)

Mark Beach received his PhD for research addressing the application of Smart Antenna techniques to GPS from the University of Bristol in 1989, where he subsequently joined as a member of academic staff. He was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 1996, Reader in 1998 and Professor in 2003. He was Head of the Department of Electrical & Electronic Engineering from 2006 to 2010, then spearheaded Bristol’s hosting of the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) in Communications. He is the Co-Director of this centre. He leads research in the field of enabling technologies for the delivery of 5G and beyond wireless connectivity; which includes the recent award of an EPSRC Prosperity Partnership in the field of Secure Wireless Agile Networks (SWAN). Mark’s current research activities are delivered through the Communication Systems and Networks Group, forming a key component within Bristol’s Smart Internet Lab. He has over 30 years of physical layer wireless research embracing the application of Spread Spectrum technology for cellular systems, adaptive or smart antenna for capacity and range extension in wireless networks, MIMO aided connectivity for through-put enhancement, experimental evaluation and optimization of Massive MIMO, Millimetre Wave technologies as well as flexible RF technologies for SDR modems. With a strong industrially focused research portfolio, he is also the School Research Impact Director.

Brian Collins - Managing Consultant, BSC Associates

Brian has designed antennas for applications including radio and TV broadcasting, base stations, handsets and consumer products, and has operated his own consultancy firm for the last 12 years. He has published more than 70 papers on antenna topics and contributed chapters to several recent textbooks. He operates a small consultancy company, chairs the Antenna Interface Standards Group and is an Honorary Visiting Professor in the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science at Queen Mary, University of London.

Paul Harris - Principal Wireless Architect, VIAVI Solutions

Paul is a wireless technology expert with experience across a range of areas including research, design, implementation and standardisation. He received his PhD from the University of Bristol for evaluating the performance of massive MIMO technology in the lead-up to 5G and is currently a Principal Wireless Architect within the CTO Office at VIAVI Solutions providing thought leadership on new and emerging technologies for 5G, 6G and beyond. In line with this he represents VIAVI within a range of bodies and fora including 3GPP, the O-RAN Alliance, ETSI, the Next G Alliance, the 6G-IA and the UKTIN. His experience prior to joining VIAVI includes representing Vodafone within 3GPP for radio performance aspects, contributing to the development of massive MIMO channel estimation solutions at Cohere Technologies, and working with customers as a domain expert at National Instruments to establish effective research solutions using software-defined radio. He is also a Chartered Engineer, Senior Member of the IEEE, Fellow of the ITP, and an Honorary Industrial Fellow at the University of Bristol.

Peter Kibutu - 5G NTN Market lead, TTP plc

Peter has been working in the cellular industry for over 15 years, specialising in modem system architecture and physical layer development. Before joining TTP, Peter worked in the development of 2G/3G/4G wireless modem products and small-cell base station projects for a number of leading cellular equipment vendors. At TTP Peter has worked with a wide range of clients in the satellite and cellular communication domains, specialising in end-to-end system engineering, modem system development and advising on commercial aspects. Currently Peter is the TTP technical lead for 5G/6G activities and represents the company in range of industry bodies including 3GPP and UKTIN.

Peter Topham - Principal Engineer, Qualcomm Technologies International

Peter has more than 30 years experience of RF and high-speed circuit design, taking chips into production ranging from FM Band II through cellular, Bluetooth and on to UWB at 10GHz. He has been with Qualcomm for 7 years, specialising in low-power RF design for portable and wearable products.

Event Location

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Location info

Downing College, Regent Street, Cambridge, CB2 1DQ

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