Sivers IMA, developer of mmWave products, said that it will jointly develop a 5G base station chip with RF power product company Ampleon, which it expects to bring to market by the end of 2019.

Both companies will jointly develop the product, and Ampleon will part-fund the Sivers IMA development by approximately MSEK 3.5 (about $400K). Ampleon will be the main sales channel to Tier-One OEMs for the product resulting from the project.

Ampleon supplies sub-6-GHz RF power solutions for 4G and 5G cellular base stations, with the top macro cell telecom network OEMs among its customers. The new chip is being developed in response to demand from top-tier OEMs for state-of-the-art mmWave technology for their next-generation 5G base stations. The partnership aims to bring mmWave components to the market by the end of 2019.

Anders Storm, CEO of Sivers IMA, said that it has already been working with Ampleon over the last year as part of a 5G consortium along with Fujikura and other undisclosed partners, which has resulted in a 28-GHz 5G transceiver chip, the TRX BF02, that is now ready for customer testing. The current chip will be able to address the small cell and customer premises equipment (CPE) market for fixed wireless access and some other use cases. The new chip development takes this one step further, to address specific demands from top-tier OEMs, to also offer a solution for 5G base stations.

WiGig chip ready for volume production

Siver IMA also announced that its TRX BF01 WiGig chip is ready for volume production, having qualified to the JEDEC standard JESD47JE (“stress-test-driven qualification of integrated circuits”), a global industry standard to ensure component reliability. Qualification tests consist of various stress-related tests, including simulated use over a long period of time (more than 10 years in normal use) and resistance to cold, heat, voltage, humidity, and electrostatic discharge. The TRX BF01 is a wireless multi-gigabyte chip that can be used for next-generation unlicensed 5G for fixed wireless access (FWA) to the home or mesh networks for backhaul. Sivers IMA claims that it is the only chip that can use the entire unlicensed 5G band all the way from 57 GHz to 71 GHz, a band now available throughout the United States and England to be used as free and unlicensed 5G spectrum.

The TRX BF01 has already sold to Cambridge Communication Systems (CCS), which is now building unlicensed 5G systems around England in multiple locations. This month, CCS announced that its Metnet 60G unlicensed mmWave wireless solution delivering up to 12 Gbps per radio is now live in the historic center of Bath in England, delivering gigabit backhaul to support interactive 5G smart tourism applications and enhanced visual experiences using augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) technology.

The deployment and go-live of CCS’s Metnet 60-GHz self-organizing mesh radios across the center of Bath is part of the 5G testbed program in the U.K. The test network is being delivered by key partners — including CCS, BT, Zeetta, InterDigital, and University of Bristol Smart Internet Lab — to demonstrate self-provision of 5G and Wi-Fi plus mmWave backhaul capabilities from CCS. The network demonstrates innovative use of the new 57- to 71-GHz unlicensed band and highlights the huge potential for the 14 GHz of spectrum — recently opened up by U.K. regulator Ofcom — for enabling the delivery of ubiquitous high-speed connectivity through gigabit 5G fixed wireless access services.

By: DocMemory
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