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Ericsson and SoftBank Corp. will evaluate the performance of 28 GHz links, indoor and outdoor, stationary and mobile. The trials will test the performance of massive MIMO, massive beamforming, distributed MIMO, multi-user MIMO and beam tracking and how each supports the requirements of 5G.

The 11^th European Conference on Antennas and Propagation offered a week’s conference, workshops, courses, an exhibition, technical tours and an abundance of networking opportunities.

Today, at the IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC) in San Francisco, National Instruments (NI) publicly demonstrated a real-time, over-the-air prototype aligned with the Verizon 5G specification. The 28 GHz system uses OFDM with eight component carriers in a 2x2 downlink MU-MIMO configuration, with hybrid beamforming and a self-contained subframe, yielding a 5 Gbps peak throughput that is scalable to over 20 Gbps with eight MIMO streams.

While all of the talk of MWC 2017 was about 5G and IoT, for Microwave Journal it was the unprecedented level of integration at the device level that was the most interesting.

Qorvo announced two dual-channel switch-LNA modules for base stations, covering 2.3 to 2.7 GHz and 1.8 to 4.2 GHz, respectively. Designed for TDD massive MIMO architectures, each channel integrates a T/R switch to connect the antenna to a two-stage LNA in receive mode or, in transmit, passes the signal from the PA to the antenna.

TowerJazz and The University of California, San Diego (UCSD) demonstrated >12 Gbps from a 5G phased-array chipset operating from 28 to 31 GHz. The chipset was fabricated with the TowerJazz H3 SiGe BiCMOS process.