Advanced RF Front- End and Transceiver Systems Design Overview for Carrier Aggregation-Based 4G/5G Radios
Over the past few years, there has been an explosion in the mobile data usage mostly due to the
increasing number of tablets and smart phones in use. To support such demand, wider
transmission bandwidths are needed, and hence, the technique of Carrier Aggregation (CA) has
been introduced in 4G cellular systems. This enables scalable bandwidth expansion beyond the
single LTE carrier by aggregating two or more LTE component carriers of similar or different
baseband bandwidth, which can be chosen from the same 3GPP frequency band (intra-band) or
different 3GPP frequency bands (inter-band). Furthermore, CA is supported by both FDD and TDD
modes, and this offers the optimum flexibility in the way the spectrum is utilized and how the
network scheduling is configured. In order to push towards 5G data rates (>1Gbps), leveraging
more antennas and transmitting more bits per symbol to increase spectral efficiency requires the
use of MIMO and higher-order modulation techniques. This presentation focuses on discussing the
RF system architectural challenges for Advanced-LTE based user equipment (UE) radio, and the
resultant increased complexity in the radio due to the use of CA, MIMO, and higher order
modulation techniques; furthermore, concurrency and coexistence scenarios with other radio
access technologies (RAT) are considered in how they further add to the complexity of the RF frontend
and to its linearity requirements.
Date and Time
Location
Hosts
Registration
- Date: 02 Oct 2017
- Time: 11:00 AM to 12:00 PM
- All times are (GMT-08:00) US/Pacific
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- UC Riverside, Department of Computer and Electrical Engineering
- Riverside, California
- United States
- Building: WCH
- Room Number: 343
- Contact Event Host
- Co-sponsored by UC Riverside, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and IEEE Foothill MTT Section
- Starts 24 September 2017 12:00 PM
- Ends 02 October 2017 11:00 AM
- All times are (GMT-08:00) US/Pacific
- No Admission Charge
Speakers
Dr. Walid Al-Ahmad
Biography:
Walid Ali-Ahmad is currently a VP of Technology at Qualcomm, Inc; he is involved in the
architecture and RF systems design of advanced RF Front-Ends and transceiver systems for 4G
and sub-6GHz 5G User Equipment (UE). Since January 2016, he has been also with the ECE
department at UC San Diego as Visiting Professor. Before July 2014, he was a senior director of
Technology at Mediatek, and led the architecture and RF systems design of low-cost 2G/3G/LTE
integrated transceivers and SoCs for China market feature phones and smartphones. He was a
visiting professor in the ECE department at UC San Diego during Winter term 2016, and was an
associate professor in the Electrical Engineering department at the American University of Beirut
between Sept 2004 and Sept 2007, with focus on applied electromagnetics and communication
circuits and systems. Between July 1997 and July 2004, he was a principal member of Technical
staff at Maxim Integrated products, and led the systems development of the first low-cost low-power
WCDMA direct-conversion transceiver IC in SiGe BiCMOS. He holds several patents in the area of
RF front-end tuning, and has published many articles and given many talks in the area of RF
systems design for cellular and millimeter-wave radio systems. He is a senior IEEE member and an
IEEE distinguished microwave lecturer for the 2017 – 2019 term. He has been part of the IEEE
RFIC conference technical program and steering committees since 2004; he is currently the
RFIC2018 general chair.
Dr. Walid Al-Ahmad
Biography: