5G brings endless opportunities with its powerful performance, connecting billions of devices and users and powering the most up-to-date services that leverage advanced technologies such as AI, Big Data and IoT. To deliver on these transformative technologies, Samsung is starting with the fundamental building blocks of our 5G solutions –our competitive edge in chipsets. Samsung’s expertise in developing in-house chipsets comes from long-standing R&D efforts. And as one of the largest semiconductor companies in the world, we have continued to design, engineer and manufacture chips for our network equipment internally. We are committed to developing the most innovative 5G chips, including modem System-on-Chip (SoC), mmWave Radio Frequency Integrated Circuit (RFIC) and Digital Front End (DFE)-RFIC integrated chips. Our experience includes supporting today’s commercial 5G networks around the globe with our first-generation 5G modem and we are preparing to launch an even more powerful second-generation modem to continue supporting future networks. In addition, our mmWave RFICs enabled the world’s first mmWave 5G networks and we have successfully developed the third-generation of those products. Our chips will boost the performance of our 5G solutions and reduce the size for a smaller footprint at sites. And finally, by increasing power efficiency through chips, our 5G solutions will require less power consumption to save energy and become more environment friendly.

At the heart of our 5G solutions is the modem. It is the engine that powers our solutions and plays a key role in determining feature support and capacity. Our abundant experience of over 20 years, allows us to apply new technologies to our modems faster than anyone else. In fact, we introduced the first-generation 5G modem SoCs in 2019 to power our 5G baseband unit and Compact Macro. To date, more than 200,000 modems have shipped across the globe. The all-new second generation modem will enable our forthcoming baseband unit to have double the capacity and cut power consumption per cell by half. It will also offer beamforming and increased power efficiency for our next-generation 5G Compact Macro and Massive MIMO radio and further reduce the size of both products.

Samsung’s RFICs operate in ultra wide bandwidths for diverse mmWave frequencies allocated for 5G, and have excellent transmit and receive performance with low power consumption. We are introducing our third-generation RFIC with the previous generations already used to commercialize mmWave 5G for both broadband and mobile services. This third generation will be embedded in our upcoming 5G Compact Macro and will enable dual band support of the 28GHz and 39GHz spectrums. It will also reduce antenna size by nearly 50% to optimize product design and maximize interior space and reduce power consumption to keep the radio compact and lightweight. The new RFIC will also double the output power of the next-generation 5G Compact Macro, enhancing overall coverage.

Samsung’s first Digital/Analog Front End (DAFE) chip converted digital and analog signals for 5G communications while efficiently reducing the size, weight and power consumption of 5G base station. The new chip now combines RFIC and DFE functions for both below-6GHz and mmWave applications. The integrated chip supports twice the frequency bandwidth than before and further reduces the size and increases output power for our next-generation 5G solutions.