Hua Wang and his colleagues from Georgia Tech and Toshiba Corporation have been named the recipients of the 2016 Microwave Magazine Best Paper Award of the IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society (MTT-S). This award recognizes a peer-reviewed technical article from the prior calendar year that provides the finest overview of the state-of-the-art in a given area of the IEEE MTT Society’s field of interest.  

The award-winning paper, entitled “The Wireless Workhorse: Mixed-Signal Power Amplifiers Leverage Digital and Analog Techniques to Enhance Large-Signal RF Operations,” is based on Wang’s collaboration with Toshiba Corporation and was published in the September 2015 issue of Microwave Magazine.

Wang is the Demetrius T. Paris Junior Professor in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). His coauthors on the paper are Shouhei Kousai and Kohei Onizuka, collaborators from Toshiba, and Song Hu, an ECE Ph.D. student in the Georgia Tech Electronics and Micro-System Lab, which Wang directs.

This paper reviews recently reported new architectures for silicon-based power amplifiers (PAs) that exploit mixed-signal (both analog and digital) techniques to substantially improve PA performance, such as PA back-off power efficiency, in-band/out-of-band linearity, and robustness against antenna load variations. These advanced PA architectures and designs have become complex, mixed-signal/mixed-mode RF systems with orchestrated collaborations among analog, digital, and large-signal RF operations.

The team will be presented with the award at the IEEE MTT-S Awards Banquet, which will be held on May 25 in San Francisco during the 2016 International Microwave Symposium.