System-Led Success in 5G

New design approach helps 5G device ecosystem flourish

We’ve written in the past about the various elements in a modern smartphone and the added complexity that 5G is bringing. To reuse the car analogy, a car demands the careful balancing of several parts, starting from the chassis and including the engine, transmission and so on. The interrelationship of these parts is all-important, and design has a big impact on performance. It’s the same dynamic with smartphones; although all will have similar mechanisms in common such as a modem, transceiver, CPU, GPU and an abundance of radio frequency (RF) components, not all smartphones are equal.

As we predicted, there’s evidence of this in 2020. The abundance of 5G devices that have been announced or will soon be launched is a significant mark of progress. The industry has never seen this level of breadth in manufacturers, models and price tiers this early in a new generation of handsets. Most of these devices are based on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon platforms, with more than 70 designs either released or in process on its Snapdragon 865 platform. Competition is coming from MediaTek in particular, but rivals have a sizeable gap to close.

This begs the question as to how the smartphone ecosystem has managed to develop so quickly and broadly, despite the increased complexity that 5G brings with the introduction of new time- and frequency-division duplex frequencies, huge band variation from sub-6 GHz to millimetre wave and wider channel bandwidths.

Although there is no single answer, a major factor has been Qualcomm’s focus on a complete modem-RF system. It’s worth recapping how smartphone design has largely worked to date: a manufacturer would pick and choose the various elements needed, from the modem to antenna, from a range of suppliers. This provided choice and flexibility, but as complexity increased, the design and commercialization process became substantially harder.

Integrating and optimizing the various components into a system becomes more complicated and expensive. In a smartphone market where design cycles, time-to-market and margins are crucial and competition intense, the process is a gamble for manufacturers unless they have clear scale and the required RF expertise.

By contrast, Qualcomm’s modem-RF system approach addresses much of this complexity through integration and optimization of RF components such as filters, power amplifiers, multiplexers and antenna tuners. Thanks to Qualcomm’s joint venture with TDK and acquisition of its remaining interest in RF360, phone manufacturers can select a platform knowing these components are fully compatible and optimized.

Moreover, the system-level approach brings significant advantages in performance. Throughput, coverage, form factor, power consumption and thermal performance are all directly affected by a device’s efficiency in managing the enormous complexity between the modem and antenna. Good video summaries of Qualcomm’s modem-RF system technologies and their advantages can be found here. CCS Insight has previously covered areas such as envelope tracking and antenna tuning in greater detail.

These features are born directly out of a system-level approach to the modem and RF front end, with tangible gains for users. These efficiencies are why the vast majority of 5G devices powered by Snapdragon processors have also incorporated Qualcomm’s RF front-end solutions.

There are, of course, reasons why manufacturers would opt for flexibility and choose to work with partners such as Qorvo or Skyworks. However, as competition heats up, we bet that other chipset suppliers will try to emulate the fully packaged modem-RF system model that Qualcomm has established, in a bid to provide the same advantages to their manufacturer customers. Manufacturers, competition and ultimately consumers are the beneficiaries.