Road to 5G: 4G/4.9G/5G Modems

I am seperating the 5G modem story from the original blog post - Gigabit LTE - Global Progress and India's approach to 5G. 

Early Gigabit-LTE supported modems

Qualcomm has X16 LTE modem which supports Gigabit LTE. At present Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 chipset has this modem. A lot of present day flagships like Samsung Galaxy S8 and S8+, Sony XZ Premium, HTC U11, Motorola Z2 Force Edition, Xiaomi Mix 2, Xiaomi Mi 6, Essential’s One, OnePlus 5, OPPO Find 9 are capable of 1Gbps LTE speed. 

Qualcomm has another modem - X20 LTE modem which is technically advanced in few ways - support for 5x carrier aggregation (5x20MHz), increased number of usable spatial streams from 10 to 12, 10nm LPE processing. X20 will show its power in Snapdragon 845 chipsets which will be used by many flagships of 2018. 

Samsung Exynos 9 series 8895 modem - is another commercially available device that can support Gigabit LTE. It is being used on Samsung Galaxy S8, S8+ and Note 8. 

Intel also has a similar portfolio Intel® XMM™ 7560 Modem, which has no taker as of now. May it will be included in next generation of Intel Inside laptops or laptops. 

In November 2017, Intel announced the wireless roadmap which includes three more modems - Intel XMM 8000 series, Intel XMM 8060 (expected to go commercial by 2019) and Intel XMM 7660.

Update on Intel's 5G Modem business: Intel announced XMM 8160 in November 2018 as a single-chip multimode solution to support various connectivity standards, including 5G NR (both standalone and non-standalone modes), as well as legacy 4G, 3G, and 2G radios. To enable Global 5G roaming, it is to support both millimeter wave (mmWave) and sub-6 GHz 5G NR spectrum bands (600 MHz to 6 GHz). Being developed using Intel's 10nm process, Intel XMM 8160 5G modem was aimed to reach 6Gbps download speed. However, following a legal settlement between Apple and Qualcomm, Intel decided to exit the market, and the XMM 8160 was cancelled before commercial deployment. In 2019, Apple acquired the majority of Intel's smartphone modem business, halting further XMM series development for smartphones. Intel's focus has since moved toward their core CPU and foundry business, with future consumer connectivity likely integrated into Core processor platforms.

*** However Qualcomm believes that 1Gbps can be reached only on lab environment and in real time the downlink speed could be reached 100-300Mbps. 

*** But handset vendors also rate-limited the chipset. Pixel 2 is found to be capped to 800 Mbit/s, Apple iPhone 8/X is at 600Mbit/s. 

Future of 5G modems : 

Apart from these arsenals Qualcomm has a recent addition. In the middle of October 2017 Qualcomm just has announced the latest 5G modem - X50 5G modem as 'this is the world’s first 5G data connection over a 5G mobile chipset made for mobile devices'. The Snapdragon X50 5G modem includes SDR051 mmWave transceiver—the next-gen RF companion to the modem, supporting 28 GHz mmWave and advanced features such as adaptive beamforming and antenna switch diversity. It can connect using up to 800 MHz of bandwidth via 8x100 MHz carrier aggregation. 

In February 2018 Qualcomm announced that a group of leading global telecom major including AT&T, British Telecom, China Telecom, China Mobile, China Unicom, Deutsche Telekom, KDDI, KT Corporation, LG Uplus, NTT DOCOMO, Orange, Singtel, SK Telecom, Sprint, Telstra, TIM, Verizon and Vodafone Group will conduct the trials with X50 modem, which will be based on the 3GPP Release 15 5G NR (New Radio) standard.

A lot of OEMs also partnered with Qualcomm for X50 modem - the list includes ASUS, Fujitsu, HMD (Nokia), HTC, inseego, LG, NetComm, Netgear, OPPO, Sharp, Sierra Wireless, Sony, Telit, Vivo, WNC, Wingtec, Xiaomi and ZTE. 

In Feb 2018 Qualcomm also announced another LTE modem - Snapdragon X24 which promises to offer peak downlink to 2Gbps. As per Qualcomm X24 is the first cat 20 LTE modem, and first 7nm process chip in the market. It supports 7 carrier aggregation, 4x4 MIMO on upto 5 aggregated LTE carriers (which allows a maximum 20 concurrent LTE streams)

Ahead of MWC 2018 on Feb 25, 2018, Huawei announced the world's first commercial 5G modem - Huawei Balong 5G01 with peak speed of 2.3Gbps across sub-6GHz and millimetre-wave (mmWave) spectrum bands. It has been informed that Huawei is collaborating with 30 operators across the globe including Vodafone. Huawei also unveiled world's first 5G CPE (consumer premise equipment) based on Balong 5G01.

Samsung who already announced its upcoming flagships - Galaxy S9 and family, has put Exynos 9810/Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 in those flagships. Exynos 9810 has the following features : supports 4x4 MIMO, a higher-order 256 QAM scheme and enhanced Licensed-Assisted Access (eLAA) technology; support upto 1.2Gbps downlink and upto 200Mbps uplink, and supports category 18 LTE with 6CA (carrier aggregation).

Samsung - Qualcomm Shaking Hands

Qualcomm's 5G chipsets will be manufactured by Samsung, using the South Korean tech giant's 7nm fabrication process, which is a big step in extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV). 

Thanks to advancements in the generation and use of EUV, the lithographic technique offers a 40 per cent hike in area efficiency, a 10 per cent rise in performance and up to a 35 per cent reduction in power consumption when compared to the technique used to make 10nm FinFET chips.

From 2018-2025:

• Qualcomm Snapdragon X50 - unveiled in late 2016, commercially deployed in devices in 2018. It was the first 5G modem - supports NSA-5G and had seen limited deployment. 
• Qualcomm Snapdragon X55 - Supports SA-5G, 5G-FDD, DSS. 
• Qualcomm Snapdragon X62 & X65 - announced in 2021, X62 and X65 are designed to support speeds up to 10 Gbps in both 5G mmWave and Sub-6GHz bands. It supports 3GPP Rel 16, and QTM547 mmWave antenna module.
• Qualcomm Snapdragon X75 (2023) - 6th gen modem-to-antenna solution, supports 5G Advanced (3GPP Rel 18), introduces a dedicated hardware AI performance for 5G data. It broke 10 Gbps download speeds and introduced AI-enhanced beam management for better coverage.
• Qualcomm Snapdragon X80 - adds native satellite connectivity and enhanced AI capabilities. 
• Qualcomm Snapdragon X82 - announced in MWC 2025. Toned down version of X85. 
• Qualcomm Snapdragon X85 - announced in MWC 2025, it is the fastest and most capable modem on earth. It is the 8th gen 5G modem-to-antenna solution and its 4th gen of AI-powered 5G connectivity, which can reach upto 12.5Gbps downlink. The AI tensor processor inside the X85 is 30% faster than the preceding generation at performing inference tasks, which now enhances performance, coverage, latency and power efficiency. X85 is the first modem with 400-megahertz downlink carrier aggregation in the sub-6-gigahertz spectrum, as well as the first with uplink carrier aggregation (200 MHz) with four layers but supports upto 6x CA and can achieve the 400 megahertz of bandwidth. Qualcomm also supports switched uplink with Rel. 17 and supplemental uplink for China. The X85 also supports up to 3.7 Gbps of uplink throughput thanks to the 200-MHz 4x Uplink CA. This means that Qualcomm’s 5G modem continues to be the fastest in the land, with global band support for all bands ranging from 600 megahertz up to 41 gigahertz. Qualcomm says that this covers more than 10,000 different band configurations, which makes it one of the most capable modems on earth. In addition to NTN support, there is also support for industrial IoT applications like 5G TSN (time-sensitive networking) and 5G Ethernet, which both seek to enable 5G for private industrial networks. The X85 also has another unique feature with support for the Future Railway Mobile Communication System (FRMCS) - a new 5G standard to support connectivity on superfast European railways. This new system will replace the old GSM-R, which is an outdated 2G standard for railways; for comparison, GSM-R has a 9.6 Kbps bitrate, while FRMCS is capable of 100 Mbps. FRMCS also supports higher-speed trains up to 500 km/h, while GSM-R supports only up to 400 km/h.

Story is not complete - scope for further update