The art of designing and building RF power amplifier applications

Featuring lower latency, higher capacity and increased bandwidth, 5G is a significant evolution of today’s 4G LTE (Long-Term Evolution) standard. The 5th generation of mobile networks has been designed to meet the steep growth in data and connectivity demand of modern society, the ever-expanding internet of things with billions of connected devices and tomorrow’s innovations. They’ll initially operate in conjunction with existing 4G networks before evolving to fully stand-alone networks in subsequent releases and coverage expansions.

5G applications operate in three frequency bands. The low-band (600-700 MHz) base station tower has a large area coverage with a ten kilometer radius, combined with a narrow bandwidth and speeds of 30-250 Mb/s. In the mid-band (3.4-3.8 GHz in Europe), the tower covers a radius of four kilometers and supports 100-900 Mb/s. Together, these are called sub-6 GHz bands. The high band (26-27.5 GHz) in the millimeter-wave (mm-wave) spectrum services a radius of less than one kilometer with typical speeds of 1-3 Gb/s. Higher frequencies bring higher bandwidth and speed, but lower area coverage.