milestone! Samsung 5G radio frequency integrated circuit RFIC began commercial use

Samsung Electronics has just announced that its 5G RF integrated circuit (RFIC) is already commercially ready, which is a key component for the production and commercialization of next-generation base stations and other radio access products.

Paul Kyungwhoon Cheun, executive vice president and next-generation communications business team leader of Samsung Electronics, said: “Samsung has been working hard to develop various basic technologies of 5G RFIC for many years. We are happy to finally integrate all of them and announce this. An important milestone on the road to commercial 5G development. This will play an important role in the upcoming networking revolution."

Samsung announced a new RFIC at the 5G Mobile Technology Symposium held by the Korea Communications and Information Science Research Institute. They detailed the development process and advantages of the chip and outlined its role in the commercial 5G product roadmap.

RFIC aims to significantly enhance the overall performance of 5G access units (5G base stations). Samsung emphasized the low-cost, high-efficiency, and compact form factor in its design, and these factors are very important for achieving 5G's commitment.

The RFIC uses a high-gain/high-efficiency power amplifier (the technology announced by Samsung last June), which means that the chip can provide extended coverage of the millimeter wave band. At the same time, Samsung's RFIC can greatly improve transmission and reception performance. RFIC can also reduce the phase noise in its operating frequency band, so that even in a noisy environment, the system can obtain clearer radio signals (in a noisy environment, loss of signal quality can affect high-speed communications). The chip also includes a compact chain of 16 low-loss antennas, which further improves overall efficiency and performance.

Samsung's RFIC is expected to be used for 28GHz mega-packet spectrum, and the United States, Japan, and South Korea have already adopted this band as an early 5G deployment target. With the completion of chip development, Samsung is speeding up plans for 5G commercial products. It is expected that the first RFIC-equipped solution will be announced early next year.