Top 10 5G chips and modules

The big drivers of 5G mobile network adoption are higher bandwidth, lower latency and higher reliability. For 5G chipmakers, this translates into a need for 5G chips and modules with higher efficiency, lower power consumption and higher integration. They are meeting the challenge with new devices that focus on greater flexibility to ease design efforts and simplify implementation, AI integration for higher performance, and power-saving features and low-power architectures.

Chipmakers are now supporting 3rd Generation Partner Project (3GPP) Release 17 and Release 18 features, which include support for the next generation of 5G Advanced systems and enterprise use cases. This includes 5G RedCap (short for “reduced capability”) for cost-effective 5G devices in IoT applications. Also part of 5G Advanced is AI integration for performance and energy-efficiency improvements and new power-saving features. AI/ML will play a big role in the transition from 5G Advanced to 6G.

Other trends include support for 5G fixed wireless access (FWA), including millimeter-wave (mmWave) FWA as well as Open RAN, thanks to a growing ecosystem, and massive MIMO (mMIMO), a key technology for 5G New Radio (NR).

Many of these solutions focus on higher integration to deliver ease of development. They pack a lot of features and functionality to reduce design complexity, particularly around RF design, while addressing the need for miniaturization and lower cost. Part of the integration effort also includes AI to drive new applications as well as enhancements in performance.

Here are the top 10 5G chips, chipsets and modules introduced over the past year that address these challenges with greater flexibility and new features to further drive 5G adoption.

Arctic Semiconductor recently launched its SilverWings low-power all-in-one RF transceiver. It features an innovative analog and digital data conversion approach for greater design flexibility and optimized performance in a range of applications, including wireless radios, satellite communication, repeaters, FWA devices, user equipment, medical devices and instrumentation.

Claimed as the industry’s first 4 × 4 low-power transceiver, the new device offers multi-stage up- and down-conversion from digital to RF and RF to digital for programmable and flexible system designs, tailored around the operating frequency, bandwidth and required specifications for optimal performance, Arctic said. The quad-channel transceiver supports 5G bands operating from 600 MHz up to 7.2 GHz.

The SilverWings RF transceiver leverages Arctic’s low-power architecture and expertise in both analog and digital design. It integrates high-performance analog capabilities with high-bandwidth digital features, incorporating unique digital-IF and high-IF conversion methodologies to improve performance and reduce costs.

The all-in-one capability refers to the transceiver’s suite of functionalities required for full up-conversion and down-conversion. The receiver end features an RF gain stage, facilitating ultra-fast automatic gain control to counter interference. Digital pre-distortion (DPD) is incorporated on the transmit side to mitigate external power amplifier (PA) non-linearity. It integrates DDC and DUC to support multiple intra-band aggregation.

In addition, the unique digital-IF conversion methodology eliminates the need for software calibration steps aimed at compensating for IQ imbalance and LO leakage. By eliminating the need for calibration, it saves significant costs during the development and production stages, the company said.

Another key feature is its ultra-low power consumption. The SilverWings transceiver offers a more than 60% reduction in power consumption, compared with equivalent offerings in the market, according to the company, while also integrating RF gain with gain control within both the receive and transmit paths.

Marvell Technology Inc. has introduced two new OCTEON 10 processors for server-class performance in networking devices. The new OCTEON 10 data processing units (DPUs), the CN102 and CN103, target data and control plane applications in routers, firewalls, 5G small cells, SD-WAN appliances and control plane applications in top-of-rack switches and line card controllers.

The OCTEON 10 CN102 and CN103, with up to eight Arm Neoverse N2 cores, deliver 3× the performance of Marvell’s previous DPU solutions while reducing power consumption by 50% to 25 W. The chips can be used as an offload DPU for host processors or as the primary processor in devices. The increased performance per watt also enables OEMs to design fanless systems to simplify systems and further reduce cost, maintenance and power consumption, the company said.

Introduced in 2021, the OCTEON 10 DPUs share a common foundation of 5-nm process technology, Arm Neoverse N2 processors, hardware accelerators, industry-leading I/O and DDR5 support. The chips are designed with a different number of CPU cores, different types and numbers of hardware accelerators and other technologies, and optimized data paths to create different models that are optimized for specific applications, customer segments and performance requirements, the company said.

For example, the OCTEON 10 CN102 is designed with a 10G SerDes to better suit entry-level equipment, while the CN103 contains a 56G SerDes for higher throughput.

Other features include DDR5 up to 5,600 MT/s, 20 Ethernet media access control (MAC) with MACsec support, inline IPsec engine to enable 50-Gbits/s IPsec with 50% of single N2 core, and hardware packet acceleration with VPP optimization.

MaxLinear Inc. launched a single chip for 5G Open RAN radio units (RUs) in a 31 × 31-mm flip-chip ball-grid array package. Also available are an evaluation platform, software and tools. The new system-on-chip (SoC) platform is designed to ease the development of Open RAN radios, enabling a reduction in size, weight, power and cooling as well as cost.

The MXL17xxx family of devices, called Sierra, are highly integrated SoCs that are optimized for 4G/5G Open RAN RUs. The family supports a range of RU applications, including traditional macro, mMIMO, picocell and all-in-one small cells.

The Sierra devices integrate several subsystems into a single chip, providing a complete software-programmable radio-signal-processing engine for Open RAN RUs (O-RUs). These include the RF transceiver, supporting up to eight transmitters, eight receivers and two feedback receivers; a digital front end, including DPD, crest factor reduction and passive intermodulation cancellation; a low-PHY baseband processor, supporting 5G, 4G and NB-IoT air interfaces; and an O-RAN Alliance split 7.2× fronthaul interface.

The RF transceiver uses a low-power wideband zero-IF architecture. Each receiver supports wide signal bandwidths up to 400 MHz, and each transmitter and feedback receiver supports signal bandwidths up to 900 MHz. It can operate in 8T8R single-band or 2 × 4T4R multi-band configurations.

MaxLinear’s MaxLIN DPD solution for wideband PA linearization is at the center of Sierra’s design, the company said, supporting up to 400 MHz of occupied bandwidth. The linearization performance is reported to exceed the 3GPP and U.S. FCC unwanted emissions requirements with margin while delivering high PA efficiency. This translates into lower energy consumption and lighter radios. It supports different PA architectures, technologies and power levels for all potential RU applications.

However, OEMs have the option to implement their own DPD using the Sierra on-chip compute resources, the company said.

Sierra integrates an embedded CPU, a quad-core Arm A53 processor with Neon extensions, for system control. Each Arm core has 1 MB of internal SRAM and access to an additional 8 GB of external DRAM through a DDR controller.

MaxLinear said the system integration delivers a high-performance RU building block that reduces the need for multiple FPGAs/ASICs and simplifies new O-RU development. The platform enables designers to build new macro- and picocell O-RUs with a single Sierra device by adding the appropriate RF front end, the company said, and mMIMO O-RUs are developed by tiling an array of Sierra devices and connecting them to a central beamforming solution.

MediaTek Inc. recently released the power-efficient Dimensity 8300 chipset designed for premium 5G smartphones, expanding the company’s Dimensity 8000 lineup. Key features include generative AI capabilities, low-power savings, adaptive gaming technology and fast connectivity.

The MediaTek Dimensity 8300 is the first premium-tier SoC that provides full generative AI support, thanks to the APU 780 AI processor integrated into the chipset, MediaTek said. The APU 780 features the same architecture as the flagship Dimensity 9300 SoC, resulting in 2× improvement in INT and FP16 computation and a 3.3× boost in AI performance over the Dimensity 8200.

Together with MediaTek’s 14-bit HDR-ISP Imagiq 980, users will be able to capture sharper, clearer videos at 4K60 HDR and record for longer thanks to the chip’s extremely power-efficient design, the company added.

The Dimensity 8300, based on TSMC’s second-generation 4-nm process, features an octa-core CPU with four Arm Cortex-A715 cores and four Cortex-A510 cores built on Arm’s latest v9 CPU architecture. Thanks to this core configuration, the Dimensity 8300 offers 20% faster CPU performance and 30% peak gains in power efficiency compared with the previous-generation chipset.

The Dimensity 8300 also delivers a Mali-G615 MC6 GPU upgrade, which provides up to 60% greater performance and 55% better power efficiency.

Other features include MediaTek’s HyperEngine adaptive game technology with advanced power savings enhancements; 5G UltraSave 3.0+, which improves 5G power efficiency by up to 20% in daily usage compared with the previous generation; and upgraded Wi-Fi 6E performance with 160-MHz bandwidth and Wi-Fi/Bluetooth hybrid coexistence technology so earbuds, wireless gamepads and other peripherals work together seamlessly.

The Dimensity 8300 supports ultra-fast speeds with a built-in 3GPP Release 16 standard 5G modem. It uses scenario-specific optimizations to provide improved connectivity in environments that have weaker connections, amplifying sub-6-GHz performance and range. The modem supports 3CC carrier aggregation, with up to 5.17-Gbits/s downlink speeds.

MediaTek also introduced a new 5G RedCap device, announcing the T300 Redcap platform for IoT devices. The T300 is a 5G RedCap “RFSoC” built with MediaTek’s M60 modem. The M60 modem reduces power consumption by up to 60% compared with LTE Cat-4 alternatives and up to 70% compared with existing 5G eMBB solutions, MediaTek said. With the new chip, OEMs can increase energy sustainability in large device deployments across IIoT, mobile market, security, logistics and IoT edge devices.

The T300 supports the 3GPP Release 17 standard to offer significant advantages over existing 4G IoT solutions and features a simplified, reliable antenna design with integrated RF to extend battery life in 5G devices. MediaTek said it also reduces development time and costs.

The T300 is designed to bring 5G benefits to NR power-constrained devices with downlink/uplink peak rates reaching up to 227/122 Mbits/s. The platform’s Release 17 standard 5G modem supports a variety of energy efficiency enhancements, including paging early indication, UE subgrouping, transmission range switch while idle, PDCCH monitoring adaptation and radio link monitoring while active.

MediaTek said the platform integrates an 800-MHz CPU to ensure the SoC is highly responsive when activated. Other features include the company’s UltraSave 4.0 technology to reduce power consumption; dual SIM single active and network slicing to meet a variety of IoT applications; and support for 5G SA, LTE and NR-FR1 (20 MHz). It also delivers improved reliability with support for up to 256-QAM DL/UL and support for lower-latency connections with 1T2R MIMO/1CC.

Qualcomm Technologies Inc. is also driving the global expansion of 5G RedCap with the introduction of the Snapdragon X35 5G modem-RF system, designed to enable smaller and cost-efficient 5G devices with longer battery life. The Snapdragon X35 is the industry’s first commercial Release 17 RedCap modem.

Qualcomm said 5G RedCap is one of the primary pillars of 5G Advanced and is key to the evolution of 5G, bridging the capability and complexity gap between high-speed mobile broadband devices and extremely low-bandwidth IoT devices.

The Snapdragon X35 NR light modem-RF system delivers a streamlined and optimized architecture that offers power efficiency benefits and lower complexity design with new Release 17 power-saving features and a tightly integrated RF modem. Target applications include entry-level industrial IoT devices, mass-tier FWA consumer premise equipment (CPE), mass-tier connected PCs and first-generation 5G consumer IoT devices, such as direct-to-cloud glasses and premium wearables.

Qualcomm also recently launched its seventh-generation modem-RF system that integrates a dedicated 5G AI processor Gen 2 and 5G Advanced–ready architecture. AI is a key driver in the chip market, and Qualcomm’s most recent 5G modem-to-antenna solution, the Snapdragon X80 5G modem-RF system, integrates AI to deliver next-generation 5G Advanced to a variety of products, including smartphones, mobile broadband, PCs, extended reality, automotive, IIoT, private networks and FWA.

Qualcomm said the Snapdragon X80 delivers several of the industry’s first milestones, including the first 5G modem with fully integrated NB-NTN satellite communications support, six-antenna architecture for smartphones, 6× carrier aggregation and AI-based mmWave range extension for FWA CPE.

The Snapdragon X80 features a dedicated tensor accelerator that improves data speeds, latency, quality of service, coverage, location accuracy, spectrum efficiency, power efficiency and multi-antenna management, setting the stage for 5G Advanced and intelligent computing everywhere, Qualcomm said.

Qorvo Inc. claims the industry’s highest-gain 5G mMIMO pre-driver with the introduction of the QPA9822. Providing 39-dB gain at 3.5 GHz and a peak power of 29 dBm, the QPA9822 high-gain and high-linearity driver amplifier enables wideband 5G NR instantaneous signal bandwidths of up to 530 MHz, making it suitable for the N77 band critical for 5G deployment and other mMIMO applications. Applications include 5G mMIMO, mobile infrastructure, general-purpose wireless and TDD/FDD systems.

Designed for 32-node mMIMO systems, the 5G pre-driver provides a scalable solution for 32T and 64T radios, making it easy to deploy in popular bands in all geographies for 5G mMIMO systems. Key specs include 3.3- to 4.2-GHz operational frequency, 50-Ω matched RF input and output, and 5-V single supply (ICQ-adjustable). Other features include fast enable/disable for TDD operation, DC power shutdown and an external bias control capability for linearity optimization, supporting up to 530 MHz of instantaneous bandwidth.

Housed in a compact, 16-pin, 3 × 3-mm SMT package, the QPA9822 is footprint- and pin-compatible with the QPA9122M high-gain and high-linearity driver amplifier, allowing for easy integration into existing and new designs and reducing time to market for customers, Qorvo said.

Picocom claims the industry’s first SoC optimized for 5G small-cell O-RUs with the recent introduction of the PC805. The small footprint, low-power 5G O-RU SoC is designed to ease the implementation of 5G NR/LTE small cell O-RUs for use cases such as enterprise, industrial, neutral host and private networks.

This PHY SoC meets Open RAN specifications and interfaces with an O-DU (as part of an Open RAN split 7.2) via an Open Fronthaul eCPRIi interface. It supports seamless connections to RFICs with a JESD204B high-speed serial interface.

An external processor/controller for configuration is not necessary, Picocom said. Configuration is performed via an integrated RISC-V-based management processor running a Linux OS.

The PC805 performs aggregation of four or more 4T4R carriers at a 200-MHz instantaneous bandwidth and is operational in U.S. CBRS and equivalent bands that are rapidly becoming available in other countries. A single PC805 supports multiple bands, including both TDD and FDD for 5G NR and LTE, with a cascade of two SoCs doubling the bandwidth supported.

The PC805 is available in a 17 × 17-mm FC LFBGA form factor. Also available is a complete software suite and an RU demonstrator board (PC805RDB), used to demonstrate the PC805 SoC with an on-board RF transceiver, front end with support circuitry, and software.

Picocom recently partnered with Texas Instruments Inc. on a 5G O-RAN outdoor RU reference design that leverages Picocom’s PC802 PHY SoC and TI’s AFE7769D transceiver.

Earlier this year, Sivers Semiconductors launched its state-of-the-art 28-GHz 5G mmWave RF module for high-power FWA applications. The new BFM02803 operates over the 5G FR2 mmWave bands N257, N258 and N261 (24.25 to 29.5 GHz).

The BFM02803 supports 2 × 2 MIMO with dual-layer polarization in both downlink and uplink for channels up to 1.2 GHz. The module includes 32 dual-polarized antenna elements with 2D beam-steering capabilities, in azimuth and elevation.

The module is optimized for large-scale, low-loss and low-cost assembly, Sivers said, with the use of an air-filled cavity in the PCB. It also offers autonomous calibration routines and simple baseband interfaces to make it easy to install and manage.

In addition, the transmitted power greater than 50 dBm per polarization enables FWA product deployments in a variety of applications at the lowest total cost of ownership, according to the company.

The BMF02803 module was demoed at Mobile World Congress 2024 in a deployment-ready base station reference design based on NXP’s Layerscape Access LA12xx baseband processor, Sivers’s TRB028015G mmWave transceiver module and PureSoftware’s physical layer stack.