Cree, Inc. (Nasdaq: CREE), with its Wolfspeed business, is a leader in the global silicon carbide (SiC) technology field. The company recently announced its successful collaboration with MaxLinear, Inc. (NYSE: MXL). MaxLinear is a leading supplier of radio frequency (RF), analog, digital and mixed-signal integrated circuits.

This successful collaboration combines Cree's Wolfspeed® gallium nitride on silicon carbide (GaN-on-SiC) mid-frequency power amplifiers and MaxLinear ultra-wideband linearization solution (MaxLin) to achieve breakthrough performance. This new solution increases the wireless capacity of 5G base stations, enabling it to support more concurrent users and increase data transfer speeds.

The adoption of GaN-on-SiC and highly effective linearization technology can achieve more efficient wireless transmission, bringing significant savings in power, heat dissipation and cost, thus accelerating the deployment of 5G. Cree's high-efficiency GaN-on-SiC power amplifiers complement MaxLinear's highly efficient linearization solutions to save hundreds of watts of power consumption at the massive MIMO radio frequencies required for 5G applications.

Gerhard Wolf, senior vice president and general manager of RF at Cree | Wolfspeed, said: "Our GaN-on-SiC power amplifiers are optimized to achieve high efficiency and extremely wide instantaneous bandwidth in a very small form factor in the newly released 5G spectrum. This technology, coupled with MaxLinear's solution, is an important step forward in achieving excellent linearization performance and will help wireless providers bring superior performance and services to mobile communications customers."

The new solution solves an important industry challenge: enabling RF units with 5G massive MIMO arrays (e.g. 64 x 64 or 32 x 32) while maintaining reasonable size, weight and power. The new 5G spectrum has higher carrier frequencies and wider bandwidths, making it more difficult to achieve high power efficiency for radio units.

Helen Kim, vice president of wireless technology and IP at MaxLinear, said: "We are working hard to solve an important 5G radio problem. Customers need to find ways to deliver mid-band 5G capacity without incurring a corresponding increase in cost and power. Our wideband, high-power-efficiency linearization solutions and low-power 400 MHz transceivers can significantly reduce the heat dissipation of massive MIMO arrays, allowing for slimmer, lower-cost RF solutions."

MaxLinear solutions using GaN-on-SiC deliver breakthrough linearization performance for 280 MHz channels supporting U.S. 5G spectrum (3.7-3.98 GHz) and 400 MHz channels supporting 5G mid-band spectrum (3.4-3.8 GHz) in Asia and Europe. At an instantaneous bandwidth of 280 MHz, the Cree WS1A3940 power amplifier achieves approximately 50% efficiency at 39.5 dBm average output power, the MaxLinear MxL1600 transceiver delivers a 983 MSPS sampling rate, and MaxLin improves linearity by 20 dB The above exceeds the requirements of the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) and the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and there is still margin. Using the Wolfspeed WS1A3640 power amplifier, MaxLin also demonstrated >20 dB linearization improvement at 400 MHz instantaneous bandwidth.

Cree's WS1A3940 and WS1A3640 GaN-on-SiC power amplifier modules, MaxLinear MxL15xx and MxL16xx 400 MHz transceivers, and MaxLin linearization technology are solutions that support both traditional RAN and open RAN innovation.

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