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.

*** 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.

Story is not complete - scope for further update