Sivers Semiconductors has developed two RFIC transceivers for the 28 and 39 GHz 5G NR bands. With high output power capability, they are well-suited for 5G mmWave radios, such as Open RAN small cells and customer premise equipment (CPE) in fixed wireless access (FWA) installations.
The RFICs handle data rates to 5 Gbps and support 2 × 2 MIMO with dual-layer polarization in both downlink and uplink, accommodating channel bandwidths to 1.2 GHz. The design provides robust link budgets, flexible channelization and low error vector magnitude, supporting high-order modulation to 256-QAM for both DFT-S-OFDM and CP-OFDM (see Table 1).
The TRB02801 and TRB03901 RFICs are complete radio front-ends with a fully integrated low noise, voltage-controlled oscillator and fractional-N synthesizer (see Figure 1), making them usable in a range of mmWave applications. Each RFIC has two identical transmit and receive sections for horizontal (H) and vertical (V) MIMO operation, where each consists of 16 identical sections individually controlled in phase and amplitude before combined and down-converted. The architecture supports two interfaces to the baseband: direct connection to a modem via an analog I/Q-interface or via an IF signal to feed a sub-6 GHz transceiver. The RFIC includes analog filtering in both receive and transmit to suppress out-of-band interferers, making the transceiver robust in a noisy radio environment.
In FWA systems with a point-to-multipoint architecture, the cost and resources of the central node or access point should be shared among as many users as possible. To reduce system cost, the beam book of Sivers’ RFICs is designed to drive 16 dual polarized antenna elements with 128 pre-defined beam settings. By tiling several RFICs, more customers can be connected or larger arrays with longer reach can be configured. As the typical FWA deployment is outdoors, the TRB02801 and TRB03901 maintain consistent performance across -40°C to +85°C.
Because of the transceiver’s design, most calibration routines are executed without baseband resources, including autonomous calibration of DC offset and local oscillator leakage. The phase and quadrature (I/Q) mismatch in direct conversion mode is extremely low—the image rejection is better than 40 dB—which removes the need for I/Q calibration. An auxiliary analog-to-digital converter supports various external functions, such as monitoring transmit output power and RFIC temperature.
Figure 1 Block diagram of the TRB02801 and TRB03901 transceivers.
The TRB02801 and TRB03901 RFICs are available as packaged RFICs and as modules incorporating innovative antenna designs. The BFM02801 and BFM03901 modules provide the performance and flexibility required for large deployments in licensed 5G networks. A single antenna module provides transmit power to +45 dBm with electronic beam steering of ±45 degrees (H+V), enabling high data rates. When larger antenna arrays are required, RF tiling of multiple transceivers is possible, supporting deployments in the most diverse applications.
Sivers Semiconductors designs, manufactures and sells ICs, components, modules and sub-systems based on advanced semiconductor technology, both for 5G mmWave networks and optical semiconductors for fiber networks, wireless optical networks and sensors.
Sivers Semiconductors
Kista, Sweden
www.sivers-semiconductors.com/sivers-wireless
sales@sivers-wireless.com