Information theoretic analysis of concurrent information transfer and power gain

In this paper, we analyze the fundamental trade-off between information transfer and power gain by means of an information-theoretic framework in communications circuits. This analysis is of interest as many of today's applications require that maximum information and maximum signal power are extracted (or transferred) through the circuit at the same time for further processing so that a compromise concerning the signal spectral shape as well as the matching network has to be found. To this end, the optimization framework is applied to a two-port circuit, which is used as an abstraction for a broadband amplifier. Thereby, we characterize the involved Pareto bound by considering different optimization problems. The first one aims at optimizing the input power spectral density (PSD) as well as the source and load admittances, whereas the second approach assumes the PSD to be fixed and uniformly distributed within a fixed bandwidth and optimizes the source and load admittances only. Moreover, we will show that additional matching networks may help to improve the trade-off.