5G Millimeter-Wave RF Front-End Module ICs Design in Silicon CMOS SOI vs. GaN

This paper discusses some key design trade-offs of broadband highly-efficient millimeter-wave (mm-Wave) 5G RF front-end module (FEM) IC design in silicon SOI (silicon-oninsulator) vs. III-V semiconductors. Some design examples are done in 22 nm FD-SOI (fully-depleted) CMOS and 40 nm Gallium Nitride (GaN) on SiC. These FEM ICs cover a key portion of the 5G FR2-band (i.e., 24 – 44 GHz). We compared a 5G mm-Wave phased array using silicon vs. GaN FEM ICs and expect the GaN-based FEM can deliver higher P<inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">OUT</inf> per-channel to decrease the array size considerably, while widening the beamwidth to reduce the blocking effects. However, depending on the P<inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">OUT</inf> specs and applications, we expect both solutions could be attractive for mm-Wave 5G with reasonable performances.