King's College London

Dr Kai Xu and Professor Osvaldo Simeone from the Department of Engineering have been awarded a grant from Taiwanese fabless semiconductor company MediaTek to create a next generation transmitter, designed with AI.

The new devices hope to be more accurate, energy efficient and 6G compatible, opening the door for further miniaturisation and cheaper smart devices for consumers.

Transmitters are the most power-hungry part of a transceiver, which act as the foundation of two-way wireless communications. Combining both a transmitter and a receiver, these components enable a device to both send and receive signals. These transceivers need to be powered by electricity, and so in smart devices like mobile phones they are reliant on battery power.

This battery power is also a limiting factor for a device’s 6G capability. 6G is expected to enable ultra-fast connection speeds, near-zero latency or lag in wireless connection and a huge increase in the number of devices that can be connected simultaneously – paving the way smarter cities, manufacturing and hospitals. The ability to deal with this multimedia processing improves exponentially as their power consumption increases and so is a large drain on power, making low energy consumption and extended battery charge life vital.

To achieve this, Dr Xu and Professor Simeone will use AI to design the next step in reconfigurable switch capacitor power amplifier, a key component for more energy efficient and high throughput transmitter.

This new transmitter paradigm will enable transceivers to operate across a large spectrum of wavelengths, including those in the 6 gigahertz and above area on which 6G networks are expected to run. This is in comparison to regular transceivers which are usually attuned to a narrow band of wavelengths, requiring multiple transceivers to do the work of one powered by the reconfigurable switch capacitor power amplifier. By removing the need for multiple transceivers, devices using these new energy efficient designs could be miniaturised further and require less raw components, making them cheaper.

Dr Xu, principal investigator on the project, said “6G is an inevitable part of the evolution of telecommunications. With a fully realised 6G network, we could have fully autonomous cars talking to smart traffic lights and route planners to ferry patients to a free hospital bed which has already been reserved, but smart devices need the components to allow them to do that.

“With our multi-task learning assisted design, we aim to develop a transmitter that can send signals packed with much more data through complex modulation schemes, and offer better energy efficiency than comparable devices. That opens the door to making devices smaller and more affordable to consumers. With our work, long gone are the days when mobile phones are being made with off-the-shelf transceivers unfit for the 6G age.”

Dr Bor-Sung Liang, Senior Director of Corporate Strategy & Strategic Technology at MediaTek said of the partnership, “At MediaTek, and through the MediaTek Advanced Research Center (MARC), we greatly value collaboration with leading academic institutions such as King’s College London. This partnership enables us to combine our industry experience with the university’s research expertise to explore new approaches in energy-efficient wireless technology and contribute to the development of cutting-edge solutions. We look forward to working together and sharing knowledge as we advance this project.”

The team will be carrying on an existing knowledge transfer programme between the company and academia, where the design for the switch capacitor power amplifier first originated. MediaTek will be working with the team to provide technical insight from a chip and component design perspective, helping iterate on the final design and ensuring it can be scaled up for industry use.