3GPP held a meeting in Lisbon, Portugal, at the end of 2017, officially announcing the completion of the first specification for 5G cellular systems - the non-independent (NSA) 5G NR specification.With the completion of preliminary specification development by 3GPP acceleration by the end of last year, Is in full swing to deploy 5G baseband chip, hoping to be listed before July this year.
As of the end of 2017, this important conference attracted as many as 800 engineers and submitted up to 3,000 proposals for each meeting.
John Smee, vice president of engineering at Qualcomm's R & D department, said: "We are always trying to speed up the time from specification to commercialization due to the needs of operators. This is a competition for developing 5G devices. So, as we made the decision in the conference, we also shared with them the ASIC team building the hardware - all of which took into account the various final changes.
After the 3GPP finalized the final working group meeting on December 1, the details of the Release 15 physical layer standard were almost completed, and as a result, QUALCOMM and Ericsson subsequently announced that they had used their FPGAs' handsets and base stations in their experiments Room tested the final specification.
Smee said: "After Release 14, we started to understand the investment in the general architecture, and specifications such as slot structure, signal transmission, channel coding, test structure and so on are also becoming clear throughout 2017."
The current 3GPP specification supports the establishment of a 5G network (ie, 5G NSA) on today's LTE core network with operators planning to use the LTE core network to provide commercial services by 2019. 3GPP plans to introduce the 5G core network specification next fall To realize the so-called free-standing 5G link (ie 5G SA).
Stephane Teral, analyst at IHS Markit, said: 'The United States will deploy thousands of nodes towards the LTE standard by the end of this year. Through the fixed wireless access devices of Ericsson and Nokia, it connects to the last one planned by Verizon and others Miles to receive service.
Teral said the standalone version (5G SA) is expected to enable broadband mobile services to be commercially available in South Korea in 2019 and a large-scale trial in China where we will have Samdung, Huawei and ZTE Equipment provided by ZTE.
Another market researcher predicts that due to the reduction of LTE construction, it is estimated that by 2021, 5G construction will really enable the growth of the base station market.
Suppliers actively layout 5G baseband chip
Over the past year, both Intel and Qualcomm have released their own 5G mobile baseband chipsets, which base station OEMs typically use as their own ASIC design as part of their secret weapon.
At present, Qualcomm client shipments of LTE baseband chips account for about half of the market, followed by Samsung and Mediatek.In addition, the market research firm Strategy Analytics said that Intel due to the latest generation of Apple's iPhone made the design Orders, which are now substantially boosting their overall market rankings.
But who will win the 5G baseband chip race? Ultimately, it will depend on the quality it performs and when it will go public, Smee said suppliers will keep the chips differentiated, including the global bands they support The number of receive / transmit antennas, as well as the delays, transmission rates and energy efficiencies they achieve - especially in the case of power amplifiers.
Looking ahead, the Release 16 specification is expected to support next generation modem's ability to share shared license / grant-free spectrum, ultra-low latency links, and base stations to communicate and coordinate tasks.
Qualcomm and Ericsson tested Release 15 for the 3.5 GHz and 28 GHz bands at their laboratories in the United States and Sweden, respectively. In addition, nine operators, including AT & T, NTT Docomo, Orange, SK Telecom, Verizon and Vodafone, respectively The respective test results or observations.
At the end of November last year, China Mobile tested with ZTE's 5G NR prototype base station in its lab, and Qualcomm announced plans to test its prototype baseband at Nokia base stations.
Smee said: 'In the coming months, we will work with operators to further enhance their capabilities and be ready for over-the-air (OTA) trials to get their technology out of the lab for on-site applications.'
Compile: Susan Hong