From 4G to 5G, how does the high-end smartphone RF front end evolve?
From the earliest feature machines used primarily for calls and text messages to smartphones that download faster than many home networks, the radio frequency (RF) front end has been a neglected part. Today, most smartphone users don't even know what the RF front-end is, but it is still the most important part of the phone design since its inception. The RF Front End (RFFE) is the functional area between the RF transceiver and antenna of a mobile phone. It consists primarily of power amplifiers (PAs), low noise amplifiers (LNAs), switches, duplexers, filters, and other passive devices. Without the proper RFFE, the device can't connect to the mobile network at all, which is useless for today's users. A well-designed RFFE is critical to today's innovations in handset performance, functionality and industrial design.
As the smartphone market continues to mature, the high-end market continues to evolve. Early high-end smartphones had smaller screens, shorter battery life, and insufficient mobile network bandwidth to transmit HD video or download large files. Fortunately, if users are more than just satisfied with calls and text messages, they can now immerse themselves in their phones, especially since the birth of LTE phones. In the past few years, the needs of smartphone users have expanded, benefiting in part from the growing popularity of social media applications such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. These applications accelerate the production and consumption of user-generated content, driving faster, more consistent download and upload speeds. Since the birth of LTE devices, the complexity of RFFE has increased significantly; improvements in other features of the device have also gained more recognition in improving the overall user experience, but these improvements have led to a more challenging RFFE design environment.
Today, consumer application experiences like consumer video continue to increase, making it one of the most common application behaviors for smartphone users. As a result, as smartphone shipments increase, so does the screen size. Smartphones with screens of 5 inches and above accounted for 73% of shipments in 2016, compared to 53% a year ago. Large screens often drag battery life, which also drives a larger battery capacity design. Together, these changes and other functional improvements have led to a reduction in the physical space of critical RFFE components. At the same time, considering the impact of large-size screens on battery life, RFFE is designed to pay more attention to power efficiency than ever before.
Gigabit LTE and RF front end: this is complicated
With the development of each generation of wireless wide area network (WWAN) technology, the complexity of the RF front end is also increasing. However, compared to any previous generation, the latest generation of flagship products has made a step-by-step leap in RF content and complexity. The upgrade from LTE-A to LTE-A Pro may be the biggest leap in RFFE design.
The RFFE design complexity standard increases as the number of transmit and receive channels within the same device increases. This is usually related to the number of antennas used in the RFFE design and the number of supported spatial data streams. As seen in the Galaxy S6 Edge+ above and the S7 Edge below, the antenna architecture remains relatively constant between Cat 6 and Cat 9/12 devices, while the number of antennas will be seen in Cat 16 devices. A significant increase.
With its extended carrier aggregation capabilities, higher-order modulation, more complex antenna architecture, more and more spatial streams, and LTE-U capabilities, RFFEs for new high-end smartphones like the Galaxy S8 and S8+ can be said to be They were released at the most complex smartphone RF design.
The Galaxy S8 and S8+ are the first production smartphones to support Cat16 LTE, with a downlink speed of approximately gigabits per second (1 Gbps), which is significant compared to the previous generation flagship modems supporting LTE Cat12 600 Mbps. improve. Faster download speeds not only benefit end users, but also benefit mobile network operators and other devices on the network. Cat16 LTE delivers faster data transfer speeds, smaller duty cycles for mobile devices, extended battery life, and freed network resources through more efficient network interaction. In addition, operators can use license-free spectrum through technologies like LTE-U.
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