SiTune and MixComm announced a collaboration to develop 5G mmWave reference designs. These solutions will be based on SiTune’s IceWings RF transceiver and MixComm’s mmWave solutions including the SUMMIT2629 Beamformer Front End IC and the ECLIPSE3741 Antenna in Package, which was recently released.

Both SiTune and MixComm have been recognized for developing high performance yet energy efficient 5G solutions. Through this collaboration, customers will be able to develop systems that maximize performance and thermal efficiency but with an optimal bill of materials and fast time to market. Initial reference designs from the two companies will be ideal for 5G open radio access network (O-RAN) infrastructure such as small cells and customer premises equipment.

“We are excited to be working with innovative companies like MixComm to provide best in class solutions in the 5G O-RAN infrastructure segment,” said Vahdi Toosi, SiTune’s CEO.

“SiTune’s Hardware Intelligent Circuits (HIC™) technology enables the most energy efficient RF transceivers in the industry,” said Dr. Marzieh Veyseh, CTO of SiTune. “IceWings 5G RF transceiver is sampling now to OEMs and ODMs across the 5G ecosystem to rapidly develop cost and energy efficient solutions.”

“Reference designs that combine SiTune’s IceWings transceivers and MixComm’s millimeter-wave portfolio enable customers to target FR1 and FR2 in a unified solution,” said Dr. Harish Krishnaswamy, MixComm co-founder and CTO, adding, “The combination of MixComm and SiTune offers customers deep expertise from the mmWave layer to the MAC layer, greatly simplifying mmWave deployments.”

“The MixComm team is thrilled to work with SiTune on high performance yet energy efficient reference designs that will speed development and deployment of 5G mmWave solutions,” said Mike Noonen, MixComm CEO. “SiTune is an ideal partner to help reduce the complexity and time to market for 5G solutions.”

SiTune IceWings Highlights:

  • Lower power consumption: Accelerate the deployment of 5G networks by leveraging new low power technology perfect for energy efficient infrastructure systems including radio unit (RU), small cell, gNodeB and CPE
  • Sub-6 and mmWave convergence: Ultimate hardware design flexibility and novel architecture leading to a single pluggable chip converging sub-7GHz bands including Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) and LTE bands with mmWave IF transceiver solution
  • Multi-standard interface: Applicable to a wide range of wireless standards due to a flexible scalable RF interface supporting RF frequencies of 600 MHz to 7.2 GHz
  • High performance solutions: Complying with 5G NR, Wi-Fi 6/6E and 4G LTE specifications and offering superior performance when it comes to signal quality, noise, linearity and power consumption as well as supporting digital pre-distortion algorithms due to the inherently innovative architecture
  • Scalable support: Supports various High-bandwidth 5G applications including gNodeB, private networks, Enterprise CPE, IoT Edge Compute and small cells.

MixComm SUMMIT2629 Highlights:

  • Industry-leading efficiency
  • Four-element dual-pol. Tx/Rx with independent polarization beam directions
  • High-power, high efficiency SOI CMOS power amplifiers
  • State-of-the-art low noise amplifiers and low-loss T/R switching
  • Ultra-low Tx/Rx-mode power consumption
  • Extensive on-chip temperature and power sensing
  • High speed SPI with large on-chip beam table storage
  • Wafer-level chip-scale package compatible with low-cost PCB manufacturing
  • Support for large-scale arrays through multiple chip-addressing modes    

MixComm ECLIPSE3741 Highlights:

  • Sixteen-element dual polarization phased array antenna module
  • Optimized for tiling multiple ECLIPSE modules together for larger arrays
  • Full Tx/Rx TDD beam forming RF chains
  • Ultra-low Tx and Rx power consumption
  • High-power stacked SOI CMOS PAs
  • Low-loss T/R switches for TDD applications
  • Independent dual polarization beam directions
  • 2048-entry on-chip beam table storage
  • Antenna in package BGA module 15 x 15  mm.