Qualcomm said this week it plans to have a 5G chip available for smartphone manufacturers to sample in the second half of 2017. The company is the largest supplier of cellular modems to smartphone manufacturers, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The Snapdragon X50 modem chip is predicted to deliver download speeds of up to five gigabits-per-second. That’s about 100 times faster than peak speeds claimed by many networks that use LTE technology.
To compare, Qualcomm’s most advanced commercialized 4G modem offers 450 Mbps transfers. To achieve the 11x performance increase, Qualcomm used very wide bandwidths in the 28 GHz millimeter wave spectrum to increase the amount of data transferred at one time, reports Digital Journal.
But millimeter waves need a line-of-sight connection to a cell tower. To compensate, Qualcomm designed the X50 around multi-element antenna arrays. The antennas work together to bounce the millimeter wave energy off obstacles, enabling data to reach the 5G cell the phone is connecting to.
If the device is out of cell tower range, the X50 falls back to an accompanying 4G modem; Qualcomm says the transition is “seamless,” according to Digital Journal.
Qualcomm is working with device manufacturers to deploy 5G networks and smartphones. Many carriers don’t plan to begin offering 5G until 2020.
October 21, 2016
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