"Although the game with Broadcom is still ongoing, it can hardly hide Qualcomm's desire for the upcoming 5g era. Steve molenkov, CEO of Qualcomm, once said, "5g will produce products and services worth up to $12 trillion in 2035, create 22 million jobs, and its impact on the world economy will be similar to the emergence of electricity or cars."
As an important contributor to 5g basic technology, Qualcomm has profound accumulation in both 5g and the Internet of things. The annual World Mobile Conference (MWC) has become an excellent platform to release the good news of technology.
5g enters the countdown of commercial sprint
3GPP 5g standardization process was started in 2015. With the continuous development of technology and through communication, discussion and cooperation among all parties, the first implementable non standalone (NSA) 5g new air interface (5g NR) specification was successfully completed at the 3GPP TSG ran plenary meeting held in Lisbon, Portugal, on December 21, 2017. 30 upstream and downstream enterprises in the industrial chain including Qualcomm agreed that, The completion of the first 5g new air interface standard will open the all-round development of 5g new air interfaces for the global mobile industry and lay the foundation for the large-scale test and commercial deployment of 5g new air interfaces as soon as possible in 2019.
The completion of this standard is regarded as an important milestone to support the efficient and all-round development of 5g new air interface, which greatly enhances the capability of 3GPP system and helps to create more opportunities to enter the vertical market. As the underlying specification of 5g new air interface aims to support both independent (SA) and non independent 5g new air interfaces, 3GPP decides to continue to develop release 15 on this basis, including increasing support for independent 5g new air interfaces, so as to ensure that the global industry can benefit from a large-scale single 5g new air interface ecosystem.
This means that 5g has entered the countdown of commercial sprint since 2018.
● the first real 5g network simulation, demonstrating the great potential of 5g
Theoretically, the network capacity of 5g will be 1000 times that of the existing 4G network, and the 5g rate can reach 10Gbit / s. However, the performance of 5g on real networks has not been clearly defined. In order to show the future 5g user experience, Qualcomm has conducted the industry's first detailed 5g new air interface network and terminal simulation experiment in the past few months, which can provide quantitative insight into the expected real performance and user experience of 5g and Gigabit LTE terminals running on non independent multi-mode 4G / 5G new air interface networks, so as to show the great potential of 5g.
The first experiment conducted by Qualcomm simulates an NSA 5g new air interface network in Frankfurt, Germany, which operates on a 3.5GHz spectrum with a bandwidth of 100MHz, and the underlying Gigabit LTE network operates across five LTE bands; The second experiment simulates a hypothetical NSA 5g new air interface network in San Francisco, California, which operates on the 28ghz millimeter wave spectrum with a bandwidth of 800MHz. The underlying Gigabit LTE network operates across four LTE licensed bands and multiple licensed auxiliary access (LAA) bands. Experiments show that for a simple LTE network, after the migration to 5g new air interface network, the downlink capacity can be increased by up to 5 times. This experiment also achieved up to four times the average improvement of spectral efficiency in the 3.5GHz spectrum, which provides convincing evidence for the performance gain brought by large-scale MIMO technology.
● 5g new air interface, where is the next stage?
At the end of 2017, Qualcomm cooperated with ZTE (intermediate frequency band) and Ericsson (millimeter wave spectrum) to complete the interoperability test of 5g new air interface system, and the cooperation with ZTE was the first in the industry. At the beginning of last month, Qualcomm successfully completed the interworking test of 5g new air interface system with Huawei and Nokia respectively, thus clearing the obstacles for the launch of non line test in 2018 and enhanced mobile broadband (embB) commercial network in 2019.
"Qualcomm's leadership in 5g technology is also reflected in our cooperation with ecosystem partners." Peter Carson, senior marketing director of Qualcomm, said that at present, 18 operators and 20 leading terminal manufacturers around the world have chosen to use Qualcomm snapdragon X50 5g modem for the first 5g network test and consumer terminals. The industry is ready to provide users with these amazing 5g user experiences in the first half of 2019.
"Keep the army for a thousand days and use it for a while". Later this year, at & T, BT, China Telecom, China Mobile, China Unicom, Deutsche Telekom, KDDI, Korea Telecom, LG uplus, NTT DoCoMo, orange, Singapore Telecom, SK Telecom, sprint, Telstra, Tim Verizon and Vodafone will carry out tests based on the new 3GPP release 15 5g air interface standard. The key equipment they use to test and confirm the performance of these emerging networks is Xiaolong X50 5g modem, so as to ensure that consumers can use 5g in 2019.
Will consumers have 5g mobile devices to use these networks? 20 major OEMs gave "yes" answers, including ASUS, Fujitsu, Fujitsu connected Technologies Limited, HMD global, HTC, inseego / novatel wireless, LG, Netcomm wireless, Netgear, oppo, sharp, Sierra wireless, Sony mobile, telit, vivo Wentai technology, Qiqi Technology (WNC), Xiaomi and ZTE all announced the adoption of Xiaolong X50 5g new air interface modem series to realize the commercial use of 5g mobile terminals supporting below 6GHz and millimeter wave spectrum band from 2019.
At the same time, based on release 15, Qualcomm believes that the focus of 5g new air interface in the next stage will shift to use cases other than enhanced mobile broadband. To this end, at the just concluded MWC 2018, Qualcomm highlighted three 5g new air interface expansion areas, namely:
——5g new air interface spectrum sharing. 5g spectrum sharing technology is expected to improve the performance of mobile broadband in license free and spectrum sharing, and is expected to play an important role in expanding 5g to new deployments such as private networks for industrial Internet of things. This demonstration demonstrates the advanced spatial domain spectrum sharing technology that relies on the concepts of spatial domain multiplexing (SDM) and cooperative multipoint (COMP). By achieving closer user coordination on license free and shared frequency bands, this technology can improve network capacity and user throughput.
——The industry's first 5g new air interface wireless PROFINET Industrial Ethernet. Private 5g network for industrial Internet of things is the key focus area of 3GPP 5g new air interface in the next stage. The ability to run industrial Ethernet over wireless networks can drive plant reconfiguration to improve productivity and flexibility, which is a key concept of industry 4.0. The demonstration previews the new use case of 5g new air interface ultra reliable low delay communication (urllc) supporting sub millisecond delay, including the ability of precise command and control in demanding factory automation applications.
——Cellular v2x technology based on 5g new air interface. C-v2x plays an important role in realizing automatic driving, helping cars communicate their intentions, so as to support the high prediction ability required for advanced path planning. The C-V2X technology based on 5G new port enhances the existing C-V2X technology through complementary functions, supports high throughput and URLLC functions at the same time backward compatibility to support advanced auto driving vehicle use cases, including high throughput sensors, intent sharing and 3D HD map updates.
● meaningful 5g module and x24 modem
In addition to the 5g network capacity simulation experiment, Qualcomm also released the Qualcomm Xiaolong 5g module solution during MWC 2018. By integrating the most basic 5g components into a simple module, Qualcomm can simplify the terminal device design, reduce the total cost of ownership and support faster business time, so as to help original equipment manufacturers who want to make full use of 5g technology in a convenient way, Support their rapid commercial 5g in smart phones and major vertical industries.
Qualcomm's new 5g module solution integrates more than 1000 components in several module products, covering digital, RF, connectivity and front-end functions. The key components include application processor, baseband modem, memory, PMIC, radio frequency front end (RFFE), antenna and passive components. OEM manufacturers can design by combining only a few simple modules, avoiding the complexity of using more than 1000 components to build their terminals. This means that Qualcomm has become the first company to provide epoch-making, integrated turnkey commercial 5g module solutions.
From the perspective of the 4G network currently in use, 4G LTE will continue to maintain the evolution trend. Among them, Gigabit LTE will be an essential pillar of 5g mobile experience. Especially when the coverage of 5g network is not comprehensive at the initial stage of development, Gigabit network needs to provide sufficient support to ensure users' unified high-speed network experience. Data show that as of November 2017, 43 operators in 25 countries around the world are testing or planning to deploy Gigabit LTE networks, paving the way for 5g.
Following x16 and X20 Gigabit LTE modems, Qualcomm demonstrated the third generation Gigabit LTE modem Xiaolong x24 on mwc1018, which is also the world's first commercially released 7-nm chipset, and conducted live demonstrations with Ericsson, Netgear and Telstra.
As the world's first commercially released category20 LTE modem that supports download speeds up to 2gbps, Xiaolong x24 provides twice the speed of the first generation Gigabit LTE modem. In terms of uplink, Xiaolong x24 can support category 20 upload speed, 3x20 MHz carrier aggregation and modulation mode up to 256-qam. In addition, Xiaolong x24 also realizes two industry initiatives in the mobile industry - it can support downlink seven carrier aggregation (7xca) at most, and support 4x4 MIMO on up to five aggregated LTE carriers, so that it can support up to 20 LTE spatial data streams at the same time.
Ultimate download speed is not the whole meaning of x24. Because it can support licensed spectrum, licensed auxiliary access (LAA) and full-dimensional multiple input multiple output (fd-mimo) at the same time, the real significance of x24 is to help mobile operators fully mobilize their spectrum resources and improve the capacity of their Gigabit LTE networks. At the same time, the functions of Gigabit LTE are extended to the basis of multi-mode 5g equipment and network.
RF front end: unsung hero in mobile phone
Over the past decade, the mobile phone industry has experienced two major industrial upgrades from 2G / 2.5G to 3G and then to 4G. In the process of 4G popularization, the concepts of "five mode thirteen frequency" and "five mode seventeen frequency" have become important publicity hotspots for mobile phone manufacturers. It not only reflects the ability of smart phones to be compatible with different communication systems, but also the core competitiveness index of mobile phone communication performance. Among them, RF front-end module (rffem), as the core component, plays a very important role of "behind the scenes hero".
RF front-end module mainly includes power amplifier (PA), antenna switch (switch), filter, duplexer (duplexer and diplexer), low noise amplifier (LNA), etc. Let's use a more intuitive description to show the huge demand for RF front-end modules in the market. In 2015, a top smartphone needs about 50 filters to support 15 frequency bands. By 2020, a top smartphone will contain about 100 filters to support 30-40 frequency bands. According to the prediction of mobile expert, the annual compound growth rate (CAGR) of the global RF front-end market for mobile communication terminals will reach 13% from 2015 to 2020, and the market scale will reach US $18 billion by 2020.
It was in anticipation of this trend that Qualcomm announced the establishment of rf360 holdings Singapore Limited ("rf360 Holdings") with TDK in January 2016. The new company will have a series of comprehensive filters and filtering technologies including surface acoustic wave (SAW), temperature compensated surface acoustic wave (tc-saw) and bulk acoustic wave (BAW). In addition, rf360 holdings will also provide CMOS, SOI and GaAs Power Amplifiers, a wide portfolio of switching products, antenna tuning, low noise amplifier (LNA) and industry-leading envelope tracking solutions.
The reason why Qualcomm chose to cooperate with TDK was that Qualcomm had previously expressed its interest in the full range of filters and power amplifiers owned by TDK. On the other hand, with the increasing complexity of RF front-end solutions, the importance of packaging technology has been recognized by the industry.
Taking the mobile phone RF front end as an example, with the increasing complexity of the overall architecture, in order to meet the requirements of miniaturization, it is necessary to integrate the power amplifier, filter and switch switch circuit into one chip. However, they are usually manufactured by different processes. The application of a variety of process technologies makes their integration seriously rely on the advanced packaging technology represented by SIP module (pamid), and TDK has a strong competitive advantage in this field. At present, pamid has integrated antenna switch, power amplifier, multiplexer and filter, and the latest trend is to integrate low-noise amplifier.
Within a few months after the establishment of rf360 holdings, Qualcomm has made a series of major achievements in the world's leading key design field of smart phones. In addition to traditional strengths such as envelope tracking and antenna tuning, Qualcomm also provides pamid modules (power amplifier modules, including duplexers) for LG V30, Sony Xperia XZ premium and other high-end smartphones; Samsung Galaxy S8 and other devices adopt envelope tracker, impedance tuner, diversity receiving module, aperture tuner, low noise amplifier, extractor and BAW filter; Some mid-range smartphones use femid modules (including the front-end module of duplexer).
At the 2018 Qualcomm China technology and cooperation summit held in January this year, Lenovo, oppo, vivo and Xiaomi signed a memorandum of understanding on cross-year procurement of RF front-end solutions with Qualcomm respectively. The four companies expressed their intention to purchase RF front-end components with a total value of no less than US $2 billion from Qualcomm within three years.
As smart phones reach Gigabit LTE rate, the number of cellular bands in mobile phones is also increasing rapidly to provide support. In order to support carrier aggregation over a wide range of frequency bands, manage interference problems and provide excellent radio performance, advanced filtering technology is necessary. In this year's MW
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