SMT007 Magazine

SMT-May2018

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16 SMT007 MAGAZINE I MAY 2018 Feature by Stephen Las Marias I-CONNECT007 When the industry first had the concept of 5G, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) proposed a framework of three main use cases that 5G is expected to solve. First is the EMBB or enhanced mobile broad- band, according to David Hall, chief solution marketer at National Instruments. "That's the idea that we can get higher throughput, higher data through mobile communications. Another one is EMTC or enhanced machine- type communications, which is more about being able to have time-critical communica- tion with many devices. The third use case was more of the IoT, where we had this notion of needing to support large numbers of wireless devices on the network. We need a network that could handle that type of capability," he explains. Out of those three use cases, the one that is by far the most difficult for engineers design- ing and testing products is the EMBB use case. The reason for this is that the industry will be deploying 5G at millimeter wave frequen- cies between 28 and 40GHz, with significantly wider bandwidths than the current instrumen- tation. "The rules about how you design a test fixture, or conduct testing of those products is chang- ing," says Hall. "As an example, in the past, you might connect a device under test (DUT) to a test instrument over a long cable, because at 1 GHz or 2 GHz, you don't worry about inser- tion loss. But now, when you are looking at a 28GHz or a 40GHz center frequency, you can't have a long connection between the device under test and the instrument because it is subject to significant attenuation." Therefore, manufacturers should re-architect their test systems to get the instrument closer to the DUT. Hall adds that they are also seeing the move for radios at 28GHz to have much more integrated antennas into the actual pack- age itself.

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