Abstract: 
To overcome the ever-increasing design challenges of radio front end for wireless communications, extensive research efforts have been devoted to advance the RF transmitters in recent years at both industry and academia. This talk provides an introduction on the innovations leading to more advanced digital and intelligent RF transmitters. First, an overview and the technical challenges on designing and implementation of All-digital transmitter will be introduced covering both hardware and software aspects, including active devices, switching-mode PA operation, efficient and spurious-free power encoding of signals. Then advanced techniques with demonstrators of All-digital transmitter and All-digital phased array will be showcased. In addition, Machine learning and AI techniques applied to enhance the agility and performance (i.e. operating bandwidth, efficiency, linearity) of (digital) radio transmitter will be highlighted. Perspectives on the future directions of radio transmitter towards a greener and smarter wireless communication will be shared at the end.

Speaker Bio: 
Rui Ma received his Dr.-Ing. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Kassel, Kassel, Germany, in 2009.

From 2007-to 2010, he was with the Microwave Electronics Labs at the University of Kassel as a Research Scientist working on transistor modeling and RF power amplifier design. From 2010-to 2012, he was a Senior Research Engineer with Nokia Siemens Networks, where he focused on the R&D of enabling power amplifier technologies for wideband radio at NSN Research Center in Beijing, China.

From 2012 to 2022, he was with Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories in Cambridge, USA, where he was a Senior Principal Scientist of RF Research, responsible for technologies focused on power amplifiers, digital transmitters, 5G radio, as well as emerging applications of GaN. In 2013, he received the specification award by MIPI Alliance for the development of Analog Reference Interface (ACI) for Envelope Tracking eTrak specification. In 2019, he was awarded Mitsubishi Electric President Award for his contributions to GaN development and its RF applications.

In July 2022, Dr. Ma joined pSemi, A Murata Company, where he is currently a Director of mmWave PA Systems.

Dr. Ma is a senior member of IEEE and inventor or co-inventor for more than 25 U.S. patents and patent applications on RF-related topics. He serves MTT-S AdCom Committee since 2016. He is MTT Boston Chapter Chair since April 2018.

Dr. Ma has also been a Visiting Scientist with THz Integrated Electronics Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from 2016 to 2021. He is an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques, and Associate Editor of IEEE Journal of Electromagnetics, RF and Microwaves in Medicine and Biology.