Qorvo Inc of Greensboro, NC, USA (which provides core technologies and RF solutions for mobile, infrastructure and defense applications) has announced broad commercial availability of four 28GHz RF products for 5G base stations. The firm says that the optimized architectures leverage its field-proven gallium nitride on silicon carbide (GaN-on-SiC) and gallium arsenide (GaAs) process technologies to deliver performance in miniaturized product footprints.
“Qorvo has collaborated with leading telecom OEMs to support more than 20 5G field trials worldwide,” says Roger Hall, general manager of Qorvo’s High Performance Solutions business unit. “With the broad availability of our 28GHz portfolio, telecom providers can leverage the performance, low noise, high efficiency and small footprint of Qorvo’s field-proven line-up to quickly and cost-effectively deploy 5G millimeter-wave networks.”
The 28GHz range includes the QPC1000 phase shifter, which integrates phase resolution with the ability to switch between transmit/receive functions; two transmit products (the TGA4030-SM GaAs medium-power amplifier/multiplier and the TGA2594 GaN-on-SiC power amplifier); and the QPA2628 GaAs low-noise amplifier. Qorvo says that the complete suite of 28GHz transmit and receive solutions improves power efficiency and optimizes size to help telecom equipment providers build out 5G trial systems and accelerate the deployment of full millimeter-wave 5G base-station networks.
According to Joe Madden, founder of industry research firm Mobile Experts, the deployment of 5G will enable mobile operators to deliver mobile data more cost effectively. Madden estimates that it costs operators more than $1000 to deliver a megabit per second of LTE network capacity, and 5G is expected to reduce operator costs significantly. “Our cost model tells us that 5G should be able to achieve a 10x reduction in cost per bit, compared with LTE,” Madden said in a 2017 blog post.
Qorvo wireless infrastructure products are being showcased in booth #1510 at the IEEE MTT International Microwave Symposium (IMS 2017) in Honolulu, Hawaii (4-9 June).
