Mitsubishi Electric Corporation announced that it will begin shipping samples of a new GaN power amplifier (PA) module for use in 5G massive MIMO (mMIMO) base stations on September 21. PA modules help reduce the power consumption of 5G mMIMO base stations.

Providing high speed, large-capacity communications, 5G mobile networks are becoming increasingly popular, with their 5G mMIMO base stations installed predominantly in metropolitan areas. Since these base stations utilize multi-element antennas and a correspondingly high number of PAs, highly efficient power amplifier modules play an important role reducing the power consumption and manufacturing costs of these base stations. In addition, the PA module needs to deliver 3GPP-compliant low distortion characteristics over a wide frequency range in order to be compatible with multiple countries’ networks.

Mitsubishi Electric will commence sample shipments of a GaN PA module for 5G mMIMO base stations that can deliver an average output power of 8 W (39 dBm) over wide frequencies ranging from 3.4 to 3.8 GHz. In particular, the product is suitable for 64T64R mMIMO antennas because of its more than 43 percent high power-added efficiency operation. The high efficiency and low distortion result from Mitsubishi Electric’s new GaN high electron mobility transistors (HEMTs). The wideband characteristics in addition to the high efficiency are realized using the company’s original circuit design and high-density packaging techniques.