News

ELCA @ 2021 Huawei Student Design Contest

• Thursday, 13 January 2022

On the 15th of December 2021, the Huawei Belgium Research Center (BERC) held its yearly Analog/RF Student design contest. In this competition, ten students from the entire Benelux presented their previously published research to an audience consisting of Huawei managers and engineers.
Our Ph.D. candidate, Mohammadreza Beikmirza, proudly represented the ELCA research group and received the first-place award of the contest. Mohammadreza Beikmirza highlighted his innovative 4-way Doherty digital-intensive transmitter. In his breakthrough RFIC chip, a 12-bit 4-way Doherty I/Q digital transmitter featuring a 50% LO signed I/Q interleaved upconverter in 40nm CMOS was presented. His chip achieves 27.5dBm RF peak power at 5.5GHz, while its drain efficiencies at peak and 10-dB back-off are 47% and 40%, respectively. Its intrinsic I/Q image and LO leakage of a 200MHz single-tone signal are better than -62 & -67dBc, respectively, over a 4.5-to-6GHz band. Using a simple DPD when applying a 320MHz 512-QAM OFDM signal, the measured ACLR & EVM are -40dBc & -32dB, respectively.