DPD-NeuralEngine

A 22-nm 6.6-TOPS/W/mm2 Recurrent Neural Network Accelerator for Wideband Power Amplifier Digital Pre-Distortion

Conference Paper (2025)
Author(s)

Ang Li (TU Delft - Electronics)

Haolin Wu (Student TU Delft)

Yizhuo Wu (TU Delft - Electronics)

Qinyu Chen (Universiteit Leiden)

L.C.N. de Vreede (TU Delft - Electronics)

Chang Gao (TU Delft - Electronics)

Research Group
Electronics
DOI related publication
https://doi.org/10.1109/ISCAS56072.2025.11043563
More Info
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Publication Year
2025
Language
English
Research Group
Electronics
Bibliographical Note
Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository as part of the Taverne amendment. More information about this copyright law amendment can be found at https://www.openaccess.nl. Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.@en
ISBN (print)
979-8-3503-5684-7
ISBN (electronic)
979-8-3503-5683-0
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Abstract

The increasing adoption of Deep Neural Network (DNN)-based Digital Pre-distortion (DPD) in modern communication systems necessitates efficient hardware implementations. This paper presents DPD-NeuralEngine, an ultra-fast, tiny-area, and power-efficient DPD accelerator based on a Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) neural network (NN). Leveraging a co-designed software and hardware approach, our 22 nm CMOS implementation operates at 2 GHz, capable of processing I/Q signals up to 250 MSps. Experimental results demonstrate a throughput of 256.5 GOPS and power efficiency of 1.32 TOPS/W with DPD linearization performance measured in Adjacent Channel Power Ratio (ACPR) of -45.3 dBc and Error Vector Magnitude (EVM) of -39.8 dB. To our knowledge, this work represents the first AI-based DPD application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) accelerator, achieving a power-area efficiency (PAE) of 6.6

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