5G technology, the power consumption and cost problems of far-reaching optical power supply are enough for it to drink a pot, 5g a pot

5G technology, the power consumption and cost problems of far-reaching optical power supply are enough for it to drink a pot, 5g a pot

5G is getting closer and closer, but not all places have it, and it will not be abrupt. The first version that comes to people's eyes is not the fastest version of the technology. In reality, 5G is the first to show in a densely populated metropolis. Since 2020 or 2021, 5g has gradually become popular in the next ten years.

Just as today's smartphones have crossed the 3G, 3G, and 4 GLTE wireless standards, 5G is unlikely to completely replace 4 GLTE. Backward compatibility is an important consideration for all these standards. 5G signal frequency is very high, the highest frequency can reach 300 GHz, while 4 glte is GHz. Increasing the bandwidth can increase the data density. Therefore, increasing the frequency allows 5g signals to carry more data. However, a higher frequency also means that signals are more susceptible to interference from trees, buildings, and the human body, our own body can also block Millimeter waves.

"5G technology needs to overcome several major challenges: backhaul, addressing, and spectrum," said James faucette, managing director of Morgan Stanley in a recent speech. "To use a 5 GB base station, you must deploy a base station several hundred times more. 5G running frequency is much higher than the previous wireless standard. When the millimeter wave frequency is reached, 5g signals are basically not covered in a single room. Unpredictable signals and how far they can be transmitted are a big problem ."

Figure 1 spectrum range

These difficulties did not prevent the development of 5g, but they certainly affected the promotion plan of 5g technology. The first implementation form of a 5G terminal may be a wireless fixed device, which is basically a wireless Pair Transfer. Millimeter wave signals cannot pass through windows, so an antenna is needed. So many reconnections and small base stations must be deployed. The installation of these devices requires rent, which puts considerable financial pressure on operators.

Figure 2 5G technology acceptance curve

Prepare for 5g

The Winter Olympics held in Pyeongchang, South Korea this year reveals to some extent the development prospects of 5g technology. From virtual reality to 8 K videos without special 3D glasses, all of the content proves the effect of increasing bandwidth of quasi-5G technology. Samsung even provides SmartSuits for skateboarders who can use sensors to draw physical locations and send vibration signals to wearable devices.

However, self-driving cars can be used to boost 5g technical needs.

"5G represents the basic technology required for autonomous driving experience," said Steven Liu, vice president of the marketing department of the associated power company. "Autonomous driving technology requires more vehicle-to-vehicle communication (V2V) and vehicle-Infrastructure communication (V2I, V2X), meaning that the number of radar systems to be deployed in vehicles will continue to increase, technologies involved include anti-collision radar, GPS, sensors that identify parking signals and traffic police dispatch Vehicle gestures. These systems will be combined with existing systems, including comfort control systems, information entertainment systems, monitoring temperature, tire pressure and motivation monitoring subsystems for regulating gases. Trucks used for long-distance transportation require load balancing, load shifting, and curve shear systems that must work together to ensure that goods are not damaged during transportation, and containers remain stable throughout the travel. 5G communication is crucial for these systems to correctly perform their respective operations ."

In fact, 5g is so important for assisted driving and autonomous driving that it can change the design of electronic devices used by these cars. However, the evolution of Automotive Electronic Devices depends, in part, on which side of 5g technology and parts suppliers are prepared first.

"With the advent of electric vehicles and ADAS, 4G/5G may become the mainstream standards for Automotive communications," said MikeRosa, strategy and technical marketing director of the application materials company's 200mm equipment product division. "With the 5G technology being put into use, the number of electronic devices in the car may be reduced. Because there are more memory on the cloud, of course, the cloud will not process all the transactions, but a large amount of processing can be done on the cloud, then, we provide services to vehicles through 5g links."

Two technologies

5G technology has two solutions. One is the sub-6GHz frequency band, which is slightly improved on the basis of 4GLTE, the other uses a frequency of 24 GHz or above, the final form is millimeter wave technology. Generally, as the frequency increases, the data transmission speed and the ability to transmit more data at a faster speed will also increase. On the other hand, as the frequency increases, the signal transmission distance is also decreasing. As a result, more relay and base stations need to be deployed. This is of course good news for the semiconductor industry, but it also means that 5G technology will be available longer than the previous generations of mobile communication technology, it takes more time to deploy more infrastructure required for 5G communication.

"5G frequency is very high, noise is low, and it can lead to new applications," said JamieSchaeffer, Project Director of grofude 22FDX. "From the base station perspective, a digital front end with a data converter is required. 5G mobile phones need to be integrated with front-end modules to achieve low power consumption. For facial recognition and other applications, 5g technology in the 24ghz-40 GHz band is the best solution ."

5G devices can use beam forming, beam tracking, and massive MIMO (multi-input, multi-output) technologies to piece together multiple groups of split signals.

There are technical trade-offs behind all solutions. As the frequency increases, the thickness of the film used for RF filtering becomes smaller, which leads to another problem.

"At a frequency of 2-GHz, front-end RF films (typically aluminum nitride films) typically have a thickness of about 1 micron," said Rosa, an Application Materials Company. As the frequency increases, the films become increasingly thin. The current process is difficult to control the stress uniformity on 8 inch and 12 inch wafers. So it has added the process of adding a trace doping, but it also has the limit. In the end, you will find that you need to research and develop these films in turn, and now they are generated by sputtering form. In the short term, this does not seem to be a big deal, but over time, we need to find alternatives to make thinner films ."

Even the film material may change. For example, it is now widely believed that lithium bromide may replace Aluminum Nitride because it can double the efficiency of electromechanical coupling. At present, most RF switches are implemented using silicon and GE. However, in base stations, the power needs to be increased to drive more signals to more relay devices, on the other hand, it is necessary to deal with the power cost brought about by power itself, so it is possible to replace silicon and Ge with Gan.

Other technical issues

Not only does the base station need to solve power consumption problems, but when 5G mobile phones are searched for signals after they are disconnected, battery power is consumed faster than they are in effective service areas.

"You need to do a lot of work on the antenna end of your device so that you can use it directly when you pick it up," said SarahYost, Senior Product Marketing Manager of Software Definition radio at National Instruments Corporation. "The industry is still working on how to create efficient beam models for all these antennas. If there are 8 to 64 input channels on the phone, the number of beam modes will be very large. You may have 12 sending modes and 12 receiving modes. The ranges of all these modes may be different ."

This makes it very time-consuming to Test 5g chips using today's devices and methods. "Today, the test time is in milliseconds," Yost said. "If you want to test all of these beam modes and more capabilities, the test time will be extended by 2500 times. Testing these chips is essential, but now you need to use different testing methods. We are now experimenting with air testing methods ."

Figure 3 large-scale MIMO Test Platform for 128 antennas developed by Bristol University and norde University

The advantage of this method is that it can continuously test the chip to optimize the signal, but in the testing field, this is a new concept. "The advantage of this solution is that you can upgrade it to a modular platform to track standard changes," Yost said. "It makes the platform part of the real network, allowing you to call the phone as early as possible during the design process ."

This method can be combined with some external system-level tests to accelerate the test and built-in self-check processes.

Plan changes

The current design level is not too clear. Too many unknown factors make it difficult to optimize the chip design. Therefore, both the architecture and the structural layout need to be more flexible, and the logic of the programmable capability needs to be more flexible.

"People are wondering if they need a larger control system," said SundariMitra, CEO of NetSpeedSystems. "This requires fundamental architectural changes and more dynamic computing, which means the complexity of these designs will increase. You cannot use the traditional system architecture to piece it together into a 5g system. Because 5g requires Heterogeneous Computing and memory access is not just a single processor ."

5G itself is a disruptive technology from any perspective. However, when it is used in conjunction with other disruptive technologies such as self-driving technology, unknown factors will increase significantly.

TyGaribay, chief technology officer of ArterisIP, said: "5G connectivity is always required when a car enters autonomous mode. These cars generate several terabytes of data each hour. Some of the data will be processed on the terminal chip, while others will be processed on the cloud after being forwarded. 5G will be the key to data forwarding. The challenge is how to bring together different types of processing and I/O. This is a big challenge for anyone ."

Unlike the previous generations of mobile communication technology, the adoption of 5g may be a long-term evolution of multi-generation technology mixing. Therefore, although 5G will be available in the near future, it may take up to decades to achieve coverage of 5G mobile phones and base stations outside the city. In fact, it is still controversial whether the technology is universal.

"If you look at the so-called 5G systems, they can only be regarded as prototypes," said MikeFitton, senior director of Achronix strategic planning and business development. "That's why they all use programmable logic. Standards are changing, and some different application scenarios are also emerging. So you need to establish some programmability in ASIC. The same is true for 3G and 4G. The early market of these technologies was almost entirely based on FPGA. After the market was mature, these technologies were replaced by ASIC to reduce costs and power consumption. 5G is the same, but it takes a longer time. The first phase of its evolution will be UHF, followed by millimeter waves. Therefore, the market performance will be: 5g emerged as an isolated island in the vast ocean of 4G, and then gradually expanded its sphere of influence ."

However, it is not clear when the 5g outbreak occurs. GeoffTate, CEO of FlexLogix, said that due to this uncertainty, the industry's interest in eFPGAs increased significantly. "With the emergence of 5g, people are increasingly interested in embedded FPGA," he said. The base station has a power limit. If you do not need SerDes, you can save a lot of power. It is important to reduce power consumption because performance requirements are getting higher and higher. In addition, 5g requires more base stations to be deployed. Now there is a base station every half mile, but the deployment density of 5g is higher. A large base station will follow many small base stations, which will put forward greater requirements on power ."

This is a good sign for Embedded programmable devices because they are more flexible than ASIC, and smaller than vertical FPGA, with lower power consumption.

Achronix's Fitton pointed out that the next revision of the 5g specification, that is, revision 16, will add some additional features. "You will find that these new features are very suitable for Iot applications. Iot requires ultra-reliable low-latency features, and 5G will generate some new application cases ."

Technology evolution

From a higher perspective, from the initial release of 5g to the future iteration of the technology, there are many changing components in the 5g ecosystem. In fact, just like managing a time-changing 3D matrix, all parts of the matrix are at different stages of research, development, and even definition.

"In 5G, you can integrate analog, digital, and RF systems," said RanjitAdhikary, vice president of ClioSoft marketing. "Once you start using this technology, some bugs will be hidden in IP migration. After a while, no one will be able to figure out why to do something. People quit in different companies, and a lot of IP knowledge gradually disappears ."

Adhikary said that with the evolution of 5g technology, IP development, optimization, and description will also be affected. "Currently, 5G does not have many third-party IP addresses, but we must make sure that when the new version of 5g technology is released, all elements must be well tracked at the system level, including scripts and processes. The evolution of 5g technology will start with a cable modem, because its protocols and specifications have changed rapidly, making it difficult to track its changes after a few months. In addition, if there are so many companies around the world, you must track which version of the IP is being developed and which version of the third-party IP is being used. If a new version is standardized, How do you ensure that all users using this IP address can use the correct IP address ?"

Conclusion

The uncertainties between multiple markets and technologies are intertwined.