Startup launches 5G front-end
beamforming IC
MBy Peter Clarke ixComm Inc. (Chatham, New Jersey), a startup formed
to commercialize research done at the CoSMIC laboratory
at Columbia University, has announced its first
product, an RF front-end beamforming IC for 5G applications.
The chip is dubbed the Summit 2629
and integrates novel power amplifier
circuits, low noise amplifiers, transmit/
receive switches, beamformers, calibration,
gain control, beam table memory,
temperature and power telemetry and
SPI control for a front-end module for
5G. The chip is designed to use Globalfoundries’
45nm RFSOI manufacturing
process.
The Summit 2629 operates from
26.5GHz to 29.5GHz and is the first of a
family of MixComm mmWave devices.
The chip is based on RF design advances
made at the CoSMIC Laboratory
led by Harish Krishnaswamy, which
together with the process technology should yield significant
advances over established circuit and module designs.
Krishnaswamy co-founded MixComm in 2017 with Frank
Lane, formerly senior director at Flarion Technologies and vice
president of technology for Qualcomm. Semiconductor industry
veteran Mike Noonen was appointed CEO in 2019. The company
also announced it had secured $8.6 million in a Series B
funding round led by Kairos Ventures.
The Summit 2629 achieves better than twice the energy
efficiency of existing solutions MixComm claims, with a fourelement
Airspan and Altiostar to commercialize
4G/5G Open vRAN
By Jean-Pierre Joosting
Airspan Networks and Altiostar Networks have
announced a partnership for accelerating the
commercialization of Open RAN 4G and 5G
platforms.
This partnership will combine the proven expertise
of Airspan to deploy compact and intelligent form factors
for radio systems at scale with the proven expertise
next generation virtualized RAN (vRAN) systems
from Altiostar
The partnership was born out of real-world field experience
and successful integration of thousands of sites in the world’s
first commercial Open cloud-scale web-based virtualized RAN
network in Japan. Together the companies will enable network
operators all over the world to take advantage of fully virtualized
cloud native network architectures utilizing Open vRAN
developed by Altiostar with the Airspan OpenRANGE platform.
WIRELESS
dual polarization capability that supports independent
polarization beam directions. Those beam directions can be
called up by way of a large beam parameter look up table and
the chip supports large scale arrays through multichip addressing
modes.
The scalablity of deployment
makes the Summit 2629 applicable
to gNodeB base stations
and repeaters, 5G hotspots and
customer premises equipment.
“Over the next several quarters,
MixComm will be announcing
several more products which
will continue to march forward in
performance, features and cost,”
said Krishnaswamy, who serves
MixComm as CTO, in a statement.
The 45RFSOI process is a
partially-depleted SOI technology
co-developed with the US Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency (DARPA) to accelerate mmWave innovation
and enable commercially-viable applications.
“No other company has as much mmWave and RFSOI
design and product experience as MixComm,” said Noonen, in
the same statement. “Summit’s breakthrough performance and
features are a result of that head-start and our deep partnership
with Globalfoundries.”
The Summit 2629 will be available for sampling in 2Q20.
Open RAN architectures completely
change the status quo for mobile
network economics by reducing
CapEx and OpEx costs up to 40%,
according to a 2019 study conducted
by Strategy Analytics.
The multi-vendor open architecture
value proposition of a fully cloud
native virtualized network will allow
operators to select partners like Airspan and Altiostar that specialize
in the bleeding edge of their respective fields at a level of
granularity that was never before possible with one-stop-shop
traditional RAN vendors. By creating this level of focus and
removing vendor lock-in, Airspan and Altiostar are driving a
paradigm shift in network features, innovation and economics
that will translate to improved user experience at lower cost.
www.eenewseurope.com eeNews Europe April 2020 News 25
/
/www.eenewseurope.com
