5G mmWAVE Technology Design Challenges and Development Trends

The explosive growth in areas of mobile subscriber, wireless network access, mobile services and applications shows evidences of the continuous expansion of cellular communication bandwidth requirement. The 5G (fifth generation) mobile communication standard aims to solve the substantially increased requirement of data rate and the avalanche of traffic volume. One of the promising solutions is to use the millimeter wave frequency band to get the wide available spectrum. To overcome these unfavorable channel properties, i.e. high path loss, propagation loss, rain fading…,e.t.c., the beam-forming, beam tracking together with phased array antenna are the most crucial key technologies.In this paper, we describe the system specifications and the design considerations of the architecture for the RF and beam forming of the 5G mmWave communication system. Then the design challenges and development trends of the 5G mmWave front-end module are presented. Finally, ITRI’s developed 28GHz 5G millimeter-wave development and verification platform is introduced which adopts the hybrid beam-forming architecture designed with a 8/16/32/64-antenna phased antenna array for gNB and/or UE to implement the beam-forming technology, also a beam-tracking algorithm is developed to support the mobile transmission over 100Km/hr.