The next generation of wireless technology is fraught with challenges, but that hasn’t slowed the pace.
This technology boasts very high data rates, much lower latency than 4G LTE, and the ability to handle greatly increased device density per cell site. In short, it is the best technology to handle the flood of data generated by automotive sensors, IoT devices and, increasingly, next-generation electronics.
The driving force behind this technology is a new air interface that will enable mobile network operators to achieve greater efficiency with a similar spectrum allocation. The new network hierarchy will make it easier to work with segmented 5G networks by allowing you to dynamically allocate multiple types of traffic based on specific traffic needs.
“It’s about bandwidth and latency,” said Michael Thompson, RF Solutions Architect at Cadence’s Custom ICs and PCBs Group. “How fast can I get a large amount of data? Another benefit is that this is a dynamic system, so it saves me the trouble of tying up an entire channel or multiple bandwidth channels. This is similar to throughput on demand, depending on the application. This is what. Thus, it is more flexible than the previous generation standard. In addition, its capacity is much higher.”
This opens up new application possibilities in everyday life, at sporting events, in industry and in transport. “If I put enough sensors on the plane, I can control it, and with an application like machine learning, it will begin to understand when a part, system or process needs to be repaired or replaced,” Thompson said. “So there’s a plane flying through the country and it’s going to land in LaGuardia. Wait, someone will come and replace it. This goes for very large earthmoving equipment, and mining equipment where the system looks after itself. You want to prevent these multi-million dollar units equipment from crashing so they don’t sit there waiting for parts to be sent in. You’ll be receiving data from thousands of these units at the same time.It takes a lot of bandwidth and low latency to get information quickly.If you need to turn around and send something back, you also you can send it very quickly.”
One technology, multiple implementations The term 5G is used in a variety of ways these days. In its most general form, this is an evolution of cellular wireless technology that will allow new services to be managed over a standard air interface, explained Colin Alexander, director of wireless marketing for Arm’s infrastructure business. “Several existing and new frequencies will be allocated to carry traffic from sub-1 GHz over long distances, suburban and wider coverage, and millimeter-wave traffic from 26 to 60 GHz for new high-capacity, low-latency use cases.”
The Next Generation Mobile Network Alliance (NGMN) and others have developed a notation that depicts use cases at the three points of a triangle—one corner for enhanced mobile broadband, the other for ultra-reliable low-latency communication (URLLC). Communication machine type. Each of them requires a completely different type of network for their needs.
“This leads to another requirement for 5G, the requirement to define a core network,” Alexander said. “The core network will effectively scale all these different types of traffic.”
He noted that mobile network operators are working to provide the most flexible upgrade and expansion of their networks, using virtualized and containerized software implementations running on standard computing hardware in the cloud.
In terms of URLLC traffic types, these applications can now be managed from the cloud. But this requires moving some controls and user functions closer to the edge of the network, to the air interface. For example, consider intelligent robots in factories that require low latency networks for security and efficiency reasons. This will require edge computing blocks, each with compute, storage, acceleration, and machine learning capabilities, and that some but not all V2X and automotive application services will have similar requirements, Alexander says.
”In cases where low latency is required, processing can again be moved to the edge to compute and communicate V2X solutions. If the application is more about resource management, such as parking or manufacturer tracking, the computing can be bulk cloud computing.” on the device “, – he said.
Designing for 5G For design engineers tasked with designing 5G chips, there are many moving pieces in the puzzle, each with its own set of considerations. For example, at base stations, one of the main problems is power consumption.
“Most of the base stations are designed with advanced ASIC and FPGA technology nodes,” said Geoff Tate, CEO of Flex Logix. “Currently, they are designed using SerDes, which consume a lot of power and take up a lot of space. If you can build programmability into the ASIC you can reduce power consumption and footprint because you don’t need SerDes to run fast off-chip and you have more bandwidth between programmable logic and ASICs Intel does this by putting their Xeons and Altera FPGA in the same package So you get 100 times more bandwidth Interesting things about base stations First, you develop the technology and then you can sell and use it all over the world. With a mobile phone, you can create different versions for different countries.”
The requirements are different for devices deployed in the core network and in the cloud. One of the key considerations is an architecture that makes it easy to manage software and easily port use cases to devices.
“The ecosystem of standards for handling virtualized container services such as OPNFV (Open Platform for Network Function Virtualization) is very important,” said Arm’s Alexander. “Managing the interaction between network elements and traffic between devices through service orchestration will also be key. ONAP (Open Network Automation Platform) is an example. Power consumption and device efficiency are also key design choices.”
At the network edge, requirements include low latency, high user-level bandwidth, and low power consumption.
“Accelerators need to be able to easily support many different computational requirements that are not always best handled by a general purpose CPU,” said Alexander. The ability to scale is very important. Support for an architecture that can easily scale between ASICs, ASSPs, and FPGAs is also important, as edge computing will be distributed across networks of any size and on any device. Software scalability is also important.”
5G could also cause changes to the chipset architecture, especially where the radios are located. Ron Lowman said that while the analog front-ends of LTE solutions are placed on the radio, the processor, or fully integrated, when design teams migrate to new technologies, those front-ends typically move out of the chip first and then back onto it. as technology advances He, Synopsys IoT Strategic Marketing Manager.
“With the advent of 5G, it is expected that multiple radios, more advanced technologies, and faster, more advanced technology nodes such as 12nm and above will play a significant role in integrated components,” Lowman said. “This requires the data converters that go into the analog interface to be able to handle gigasamples per second. High reliability is also always important. Factors like open spectrum and Wi-Fi usage make it a lot more difficult than it was in the past. Trying to deal with all that is not an easy task, and machine learning and artificial intelligence can be well suited to do some of the hard work. This, in turn, affects the architecture, as it loads not only processing, but also memory.”
Thompson of Cadence agrees. “As we develop 5G or IoT for higher 802.11 standards and even some ADAS considerations, we are trying to reduce power consumption, be cheaper, be smaller and increase performance by moving to smaller nodes. Compare that to your mix of concerns, observed in the Russian Federation,” he said. “As nodes get smaller, ICs get smaller. In order for an IC to take full advantage of its smaller size, it needs to be in a smaller package. There’s a push for things to be smaller and more compact, but that’s not a good thing.” for RF Design”. “…in simulation, I don’t worry too much about the circuit’s effect on the distribution. If I have a piece of metal, it may look like a resistor a bit, but it looks like a resistor at all frequencies. If it’s an RF effect, then it’s a transmission line, it will look different depending on what frequency I am sending over it.These fields will be triggered in other parts of the chain.Now I have gathered everything closer to each other and when it does, the connection Degree increases exponentially.When I get to the smaller nodes, these coupling effects become more pronounced, which also means that the bias voltage is smaller.So the noise is a big effect because I don’t bias the device down.lower voltage, same noise level has more effect.Many of these problems are present at the system level in 5G.”
New focus on reliability Reliability has taken on a new meaning in wireless communications as these chips are used in automotive, industrial and medical applications. This is generally not related to wireless communications, where connection failures, performance degradation, or any other issue that could disrupt the service is generally seen as an inconvenience rather than a security issue.
“We need to find new ways to verify that functional safety chips will work reliably,” said Roland Jahnke, Head of Design Methods at Fraunhofer EAS. “As an industry, we’re not there yet. We’re trying to structure the development process right now. We need to look at how parts and tools interact, and we have a lot of work to ensure consistency.”
Jahnke noted that so far most of the problems have been due to a single design error. “What if there are two or three bugs? The verifier should tell the designer what could go wrong and where the bugs are, and then roll them back during the design process.”
This has become a big issue in many safety critical markets, and the big issue with wireless and automotive is the ever-increasing number of variables on both sides. “Some of them have to be designed to always be on,” says Oliver King, CTO of Moortec. “Modeling ahead of time can predict how things will be used. It’s hard to predict. It will take time to see how things work.”
Village network required. However, enough companies feel that 5G has enough benefits to justify the effort to build the infrastructure needed to make it all work.
Magdi Abadir, vice president of marketing at Helic, said the biggest difference with 5G will be the data speeds offered. “5G can operate at speeds from 10 to 20 gigabits per second. The infrastructure must support the type of data transfer rate, and the chips must process this incoming data. For receivers and transmitters in bands above 100 GB, the frequency must also be taken into account. In the Russian Federation, they are used to a frequency of 70 GHz for radars and the like.”
Creating this infrastructure is a complex task that spans several links in the electronics supply chain.
“The magic that is being talked about to make this happen is trying to do more integration on the RF side of the SoC,” Abadir said. Integration with analog ADC and DAC components with very high sampling rate. Everything must be integrated into the same SoC. We’ve seen integration and discussed integration issues, but this exaggerates everything because it sets a high goal and forces developers to integrate even more than previously thought. It is very difficult to isolate everything and not affect neighboring circuits.”
From this point of view, 2G is primarily voice transmission, while 3G and 4G are more data transmission and more efficient support. On the contrary, 5G represents the proliferation of different devices, different services and increased bandwidth.
“New usage models such as enhanced mobile broadband and low latency connectivity require a 10x increase in bandwidth,” said Mike Fitton, Strategic Planner and Business Development Specialist at Achronix. “In addition, 5G is expected to become very important for V2X, especially for the next generation of 5G. 5G Release 16 will have URLLC which is very important for V2X applications. Network type application.
Planning for the uncertain future of 5G is often viewed as a series of superlatives with 10x more bandwidth, 5x latency, and 5-10x more devices. This is complicated by the fact that the ink in the 5G specs is not very dry. There are always late additions that require flexibility and turn into programmability.
“If you take into account the two big needs of a hardware data link due to high bandwidth and the need for flexibility, this means that you will probably need some kind of dedicated SoC or ASIC that has more programmability between hardware and software. …if you look at every 5G platform today, they’re all based on FPGAs because you just don’t see the throughput. At some point, all the major wireless OEMs are likely to move to more economical and optimized software ASIC power, but requires flexibility and drive to reduce cost and power consumption. It’s about keeping flexibility where you need it (in FPGAs or embedded FPGAs) and then adding functionality where possible to achieve the lowest cost and power consumption.”
Tate of Flex Logix agrees. “More than 100 companies operate in this area. The spectrum is different, the protocol is different, and the chips used are different. The repeater chip will be more limited in power on the walls of a building, where there may be a place where an eFPGA is more valuable.”
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Post time: Mar-16-2023