Freescale Semiconductor today introduced its first gallium nitride (GaN) RF power transistor for cellular base stations. The new A2G22S160-01S delivers exceptional performance in 30 W and 40 W amplifiers for wireless infrastructure applications, and represents the first of what is planned to become a broad portfolio of Airfast family GaN transistors for the cellular market.
Freescale’s addition of GaN RF solutions provides its customers an expanded portfolio of world-class products for wireless infrastructure markets. The announcement comes only a few months following the company’s introduction of the MMRF5014H – Freescale’s first GaN RF power transistor for military and industrial applications, which continues to lead the industry in thermal and wideband RF performance for 100 W-class GaN transistors.
“Freescale is driving the transition of GaN from niche markets to mainstream applications like cellular infrastructure,” said Paul Hart, senior vice president and general manager of Freescale’s RF business. “The time is right to deliver GaN solutions to our extremely broad base of telecommunications customers. In addition to utilizing the A2G22S160-01S’ excellent performance, our cellular customers can look forward to leveraging Freescale’s high-volume production capability and worldwide customer support.”
GaN delivers higher power conversion efficiencies, faster switching speeds and greater power densities than silicon, enabling the creation of power transistors that are much smaller in size and that outperform traditional devices. This is made possible due to the wider band gap, higher critical electric field and very high electron mobility characteristics that GaN provides. While GaN migration has been cost prohibitive in the past, recent commercial and technological advances are driving manufacturing costs lower.
Freescale’s Airfast family of RF power products covers the entire range of wireless cellular spectrum from 600 MHz to 3.8 GHz, with multiple semiconductor technology options. The A2G22S160-01S offers state-of-the-art performance in the frequency range between 1800 MHz and 2200 MHz. For example, in a 40 W Doherty two-way asymmetrical amplifier employing one A2G22S160-01S in the carrier path and two in the peaking path, maximum output power is 56.2 dBm. With 8dB output back-off (OBO), gain is 15.4 dB and efficiency is 56.7 percent. Adjacent-channel power (ACP) is -55 dBc with digital predistortion (DPD) when driven by two 20 MHz LTE carriers with an aggregate 40 MHz carrier bandwidth.