RF Technology for 5G mmwave Basestations
(Room Ballroom G)
17 Oct 18
1:05 PM
-
1:35 PM
The ever increasing demand for mobile data continues to drive the expansion of mobile network capacity globally. As available spectrum becomes scarce in the traditional cellular bands, the industry looks to utilize the broad available spectrum in mmwave bands. Whether the use case is fixed or mobile connectivity, it has been demonstrated that the challenging propagation characteristics at mmwave frequency can be overcome through beamforming techniques. A number of system architectures and associated semiconductor technologies may be employed to achieve a power efficient beamforming radio for a given deployment model. For smaller cell size, it may be beneficial to employ very high level of integration and high antenna count with low power per RF chain whereby for a larger cell it may be advantageous to employ high power amplifiers and fewer RF chains. In either case, one of primary challenges for the designer is the linearization of the mmwave transmitter. In this presentation we will discuss two common radio architectures, one suitable for low EIRP and one for high EIRP. An efficient signal chain will be described for each case and optimized semiconductor technology choices will be discussed for each architecture. Finally we will briefly review how a fully digital beamforming approach compares to the above described analog approaches, and technology requirements to enable digital beamforming architectures for future mmwave systems.