The ICT project E3Network supported by the European Union through the FP7 program, which Sivers IMA contributed to with mm‐wave knowhow and state of the art transceivers for mm‐wave backhaul has been completed. This project was initiated in December 2012 and finalized with good results in May 2016. A final review was held in Brussels mid‐September 2016.

Within the E3network project, a prototype of a very high‐speed (10 Gbps) E‐Band point‐to‐point link was designed, manufactured, and evaluated together with several partners. This kind of mm‐wave data links, covering 71 – 76 and 81 – 86 GHz, are crucial for future telecommunication systems supporting high‐speed data to the user.

“This project shows Sivers IMA's capabilities to work with many of the best organizations in Europe in order to create a high‐speed point‐to‐point link prototype with very competitive performance”, said Anders Storm, CEO of Sivers IMA.

It has been a very ambitious project which began with a comprehensive system analysis in order to derive the specification necessary for this mm‐wave link. The critical hardware was then identified and designed within the project. This included transmit/receive baseband functions implemented in FPGAs and RF front‐end circuits using an advanced BiCMOS process.

These key hardware parts were combined with commercial blocks to form a complete mm‐wave point‐to‐point link. In parallel with the design work, the project has also been active in the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) defining the future usage of E‐Band in Europe. As a result, the E3network Radio Profile has been accepted as the candidate for the new ETSI 10 Gbps/2 GHz profile.

The E3network consortium consisted of: CEIT (Spain – coordinator), Fraunhofer (Germany), Alcatel-Lucent (now Nokia, Italy), CEA (France), INCIDE (now IXYS, Spain), Silicon Radar (Germany), ST Microelectronics (Italy), Sivers IMA (Sweden), and OTE (Greece).