We’ve all experienced wireless call drops and we accept it as part of life. We’d never think of reporting a dropped call to the carrier. EXFO, a company known for its installation and maintenance test equipment, has created Nova SensAI to monitor networks in real time, letting telecom service providers get the feedback that users…
DesignCon video: Compressible RF connectors
Like all technologies, 5G needs more that just the “glamor” components such as baseband ICs, RFICs, and phased-array antennas. Interconnects can make or break a design, and 5G is no exception. So, besides giving birth to active devices, 5G has also spawned a need for connectors. To that end, TE Connectivity has developed the ERFV…
MWC pullouts raise concerns
Fear over the Coronavirus are taking its toll on Mobile World Congress 2020 as companies continue to withdraw from an event that typically draws some 100,000 people to Barcelona. The list of pullouts, as reported by the business press, includes notable companies such as: Amazon nVidia Sony NTT Docomo Intel Ericsson LG TCL Light Reading…
DesignCon video: Why details cause project failure
“Twenty-five percent of projects reach market on time and on budget,” said Andrea Fox of Mentor Graphics to a gathering at DesignCon 2020. The rest need more time, more money, or, in the case of 17 percent, are simply scrapped. Why? When designing a board, you may face having to use different design tools for…
DesignCon video: Oscilloscopes and DDR5
At DesignCon 2020, Keysight Technologies demonstrated hardware and software products for signal integrity design and test. Keysight manufactures many oscilloscopes. While most are real-time oscilloscopes, the company also manufactures equivalent-time sampling models used for measurement and analysis of serial data streams. Here, Director Strategic Planning – Internet Infrastructure Brig Asay explains the difference between the…
DesignCon video: Jitter analysis with an oscilloscope
All serial data streams have some jitter where the timing of bit edges differs from the ideal. With serval types of jitter composing a signal’s total jitter, you need to know which forms of jitter reduce bit-error-ratio. Oscilloscopes can decompose jitter and let you see which forms limit data transmissions. At DesignCon 2020, Rohde &…
Plastic fiber shows promise for carrying mmWave signals
Santa Clara, Calif. — While millimeter wave (mmWave) signals are part of 5G’s wireless infrastructure for carrying high-bandwidth data, it’s not the only use. At DesignCon 2020, Joy Laskar, CEO of Maja Systems, presented a paper where he explained how a surface-mount mmWave antenna can launch signals into inexpensive plastic fibers for data transmissions from…
5G develops and deploys, research shifts to applications
3GPP Release 16 will add features to 5G such as vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications. Finalized in December 2019, Release 16 will take 5G to the next level upon release, which is expected in March 2020. To find out what’s coming, 5GTW spoke with James Kimery of National Instruments. NI and Kimery have been…
6G might be easier to achieve than 5G
5G took some fifteen years to develop, starting around 2004 at university research labs. When 3GPP Release 15, the first 5G new radio (5GNR) standard, was approved in late 2017, the race to deploy began. That includes mmWave Frequencies starting around 24 GHz. At roughly the same time, research labs began looking at frequencies above…
Massive MIMO performance testing: Emulate the channel
Today’s 5G system capacity requirements created the need for massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. Massive MIMO represents a major addition to 5G. Massive MIMO enables dynamic user-focused transmission and spatial multi-user MIMO (MU-MIMO), an essential functionality for providing high data rates over large areas. Figure 1 shows how cellular applications have changed. Sub-6 GHz massive…
