STDA036 October   2026 AFE7769D , AFE7920 , AFE8030 , AFE8092 , AFE8190 , AFE8192

 

  1.   1
  2.   At a glance
  3.   Nomenclatures
  4.   Introduction
  5.   5G Radio Deployment Trends
    1.     MIMO and Macro RRU Trends
    2.     Rise of Small Cells
  6.   Radio Standard and Design Techniques to Fit Power Budget
    1.     TI RFIC Fast Standby and Wake-up Feature
    2.     DPD to Improve Transmitter Chain PA Efficiency
  7.   Conclusion
  8.   References

Radio Standard and Design Techniques to Fit Power Budget

Due to rising energy costs, building owners typically want to separate utility charges from rental charges, and demand service providers to deploy radios with independent power capabilities sourced from main grid as opposed to within the building. The independent power requires power-over-Ethernet (PoE) or power-over-fiber (PoF) solutions, which have limited wattage in transmission. The PoE standard defines multiple classes differentiated by allowable wattage. Radio designers strive to maintain total radio power within a targeted class to avoid the additional hardware and cost associated with upgrading to higher classes. Therefore, radio designers often investigate the following techniques to reduce power at the radio level.

  • 5G standard from 3GPP has included micro-sleep feature in the physical layer. This feature allows a dynamic radio standby mode during operation and enables the radio to enter a power saving mode at a finer level per 5G waveform symbol. The micro-sleep feature includes TDD, FDD micro-DTX state, and FDD micro-DRX state. These standards enable radio designers to target specific receiver channels and/or transmitter channels to enter power saving modes.
  • Transmitter Chain Efficiency: As most of the power dissipation is in the transmitter chain due to the power amplifiers (PA), the trend is to increase power amplifier efficiency through digital pre-distortion (DPD) linearization. Traditionally, small cell designers utilize linear amplifiers to achieve linearity at the cost of 10-15% reduced PA efficiency. The current trend in the industry is to utilize DPD to improve power efficiency of PA to upwards of 30%.

TI's RFICs such as the AFE8128, AFE8192, AFE8030, and AFE7769D RF transceivers enable engineers to achieve these goals: all of TI's RFICs have fast standby/wake-up functionality to enable the micro-sleep feature in the 3GPP spec. The standby to wake-up time is generally less than 2μs(1) to meet the stringent 5G symbol level timing requirements. TI's AFE7769D RFIC with integrated DPD can improve the overall power efficiency of the radio system through advanced linearization of PAs independently without external digital processing upstream of the RFICs.

1. Typical test conditions for standby to wake-up time. Please contact TI for specific standby to wake-up time based on optimized RFIC configurations for the applications.