Mitsubishi Electric Corporation will begin shipping samples of a new 16 W-average-power gallium nitride (GaN) power amplifier module (PAM) for 5G massive MIMO (mMIMO) base stations this month (March 25). This PAM product, which operates in the 3.6-4.0 GHz band, can be widely deployed in North America and East and Southeast Asia. As 5G networks expand from urban centers to regional areas, mMIMO base stations, especially 32T32R mMIMO base stations, are expected to be increasingly deployed. Mitsubishi Electric’s 16 W GaN PAM is particularly well suited for 32T32R mMIMO base stations because it reduces both production costs and power consumption.
Since mMIMO base stations use multi-element antennas and many power amplifiers, there is a growing need for highly efficient power amplifiers to help reduce base station production costs and power consumption. In particular, PAMs strongly contribute to lower production costs because they are easy to mount on a printed circuit board, unlike discrete power amplifiers that need many on-board components. While power amplifiers are required to deliver low-distortion characteristics compliant with 5G signal quality, they must also support different frequency bands in various countries and additionally must achieve increasingly higher output power to support longer communication distances as 5G networks expand from urban areas to surrounding cities.
Mitsubishi Electric‘s existing 8 W and 16 W GaN PAMs, which support the 3.3-3.8 GHz band, are widely used in Europe and South and West Asia. The newly developed 16 W GaN PAM, which supports the 3.6-4.0 GHz band widely used in North America and both East and Southeast Asia, is mainly suitable for 32T32R mMIMO base stations, which are expected to be increasingly deployed as 5G networks expand from urban areas into surrounding cities. A 32T32R mMIMO base station equipped with the new 16 W PAM can achieve nearly the same communication distances as a 64T64R mMIMO base station equipped with an 8 W PAM, and also halve the number of PAMs required in a 32T32R mMIMO base station, thereby reducing the production costs of mMIMO base stations used in many countries. In addition, the PAM uses Mitsubishi Electric’s proprietary GaN high-electron-mobility transistor (HEMT) and circuit design technology to achieve low distortion characteristics and high power-added efficiency of 41% in a wide frequency range of 3.6-4.0 GHz (400 MHz band) to reduce power consumption in 5G mMIMO base stations.