design products & applications – August 2019

10 dpaonthenet.net

Customer adoption requires on-time de-

ployments across the whole ecosystem,

from handset to base station. Making 5G

a practical reality, however, is down to

the hard work of the global engineering

teams, standards committees and infra-

structure manufacturers who have been

working towards this for many years.

RF engineering has always been consid-

ered a specialist skill, attempting to tame

a technology that doesn’t always do as

expected; a task that has become even

more involved with the advent of 5G and

the new architectural approach to com-

munications that it relies on. Achieving the

data rates mandated by the 3GPP stand-

ards committees has required an evolu-

tionary approach rather than iterative en-

hancements to the existing infrastructure.

For example, compared to 4G, 5G intro-

duces the mmWave frequencies of 24

to 40GHz, in addition to the challenges

of spectral coexistence with multi-radio

access technology systems in both the

licensed and unlicensed sub-6GHz fre-

quency range. Whether developing a new

5G smartphone, fixed-network gateways

or infrastructure equipment, implement-

ing a robust test regime is important in all

stages of product development through to

final production testing.

From the technical perspective, testing for

adherence to operator and 3GPP commit-

tee specifications is paramount and cov-

ers multiple different parameters such as

modulation quality, RF amplifier linearity,

receiver signal-to-noise ratios and trans-

mitter efficiency, to mention just a few.

The use of mmWave transmit and receive

functions has also introduced a number of

new components and semiconductor de-

sign challenges in addition to subjecting

communication to propagation and signal

path factors not experienced with current

sub-6GHz cellular technologies.

Feature: 5G reality

An engineer’s guide to

testing mmWave equipment

T

he race to win our hearts and

minds is already underway by

the marketing departments of the

5G cellular operators. Customer

retention is a key metric for

operators, and the opportunity to

migrate existing customers and

upsell them significantly enhanced

network speeds is key to starting to

recoup the infrastructure investments

already made.

Figure 1: Potential test insertion points of new 5G architecture

components (source NI)