Key components of high-performing radios for the best user experience

High-performing radios are key to get maximum value out of the precious spectrum asset

In January 2021, the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) ran the C-band auction, in which 280 megahertz (MHz) of mid-band spectrum was up for grabs for communication service providers (CSPs). The total price looks to land beyond USD 80 billion, which is by far the highest amount ever spent in a US spectrum auction – astonishing number – and nearly twice the previous record high.

CSPs make these massive investments because spectrum access is crucial for them. There are two main reasons for this:

• CSPs will need the wide bandwidth to deliver on the promise of the 5G experience – super fast data rates with ultra-low latency.
• More spectrum is and will continue to be a fundamental need to cater to the traffic growth. According to the Ericsson Mobility Report, we see traffic growing at a 24 percent rate yearly between 2020 and 2026 as applications evolve and more people go mobile.

Imagine the financial and efficiency gain if the radio technology could help our CSPs´ customers to handle 10 percent more subscribers in a given spectrum. This is a big challenge and involves Radio Access Network (RAN) functionality as well as radio and RAN Compute baseband interworking. However, it all starts in the radio, since anything you build on top of the radio can never be better than the underlying radio performance itself, with spectrum efficiency as top of mind.

Technology leadership keeps Ericsson radios at the forefront

Technology leadership is and has been Ericsson’s primary focus since the beginning of mobile networks, and we continue to invest in bringing leading radio solutions to the market. In 2020, we introduced second generation dual-band platform and our third-generation massive multiple input, multiple output (MIMO) platform. Compared to previous generations, the latter supports twice the bandwidth and has 50% higher output power. In coming platforms across the portfolio, we will continue to enhance performance while reducing size, weight, and energy consumption. To exemplify, let’s compare the evolution of our radio technology during the last 10 years with that of cars:

Between 2010 and 2020 our radio output power increased four times, maximum download speeds increased approximately by a factor of 13 and energy used per delivered bit decreased by 80 percent. Now let’s assume that the radio output power corresponds to horsepower, maximum download capacity corresponds to top speed and energy use per bit is equal to fuel consumption. If cars would have evolved at the same pace as our radios, your average family car would have about 520 horsepower, a top speed of 6000 km/h and would drive up to 4,500 km on one tank.

However, raw power and performance are not the only measures that count. It is also vital to have a broad portfolio that addresses diverse network architecture; delivers performance with increasingly smaller form factors and energy consumption; and that is future-ready with support for new technology innovations such as Ericsson Spectrum Sharing and 5G New Radio (NR). At the end of the day, it is all about minimizing total cost of ownership per delivered gigabyte. Let’s explore how Ericsson does just that!

Future-proof and customer-first radio design

People sometimes say that the only constant thing in life is change. This is certainly true for the business of radios – new spectrum bands become available, CSPs merge or enter into network sharing agreements, and new technologies such as Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) or 5G get standardized. For CSPs, the options at hand and the pace by which they can introduce new services are often defined by whether their installed hardware can support the new requirements. With so many sites, often in the range of tens of thousand – with radio hardware often sitting in tower tops – this comes down to the difference between being first to market with new services or forced to launch significant modernization projects in a short amount of time. Ericsson’s vision is to put our customers in pole position by keeping not only their present, but also their future needs in mind when designing radios. We achieve this by:

• Being a key and proactive participant in all of the relevant industry consortiums such as the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), where new technologies are specified, Ericsson is able to set the radio hardware characteristics (e.g., application specific integrated circuits (ASIC) or filters) for future technologies.
• Designing our algorithms (e.g., linearization and clipping) to support ‘any’ configuration within the operating band.
• Offering an end-to-end solution which allows us to optimally spread functionality across RAN Compute baseband and radio.

This design philosophy allows our customers to be prepared for the future. Three examples where this has served our customers are:

• All Ericsson Radio System (ERS) radios starting from 2015 were designed to support 5G NR and Ericsson Spectrum Sharing (ESS).
• All frequency division duplex (FDD) radios from 2011 have the capability to support NB-IoT.
• Fine tuning in both our radio and RAN Compute algorithms to enable power saving modes of operation for the installed based of radios via a software upgrade.

Our extensive radio portfolio is built for the future.

Deliver more bandwidth and power without increasing the radio size and weight

Our customers require us to support ever more bandwidth, often within the existing space at a site. This means that we have to improve performance and efficiency without increasing the size of the radio. Let’s take a look at some implications of this.

More spectrum from multiple frequency bands need to be managed by the same unit. The increased bandwidth requires increased output power to maintain cell size and coverage. This creates a need for more power amplifiers, cooling as well as supply power. However, traditional hardware design cannot deliver on these additional requirements since the components will not physically fit into the existing available space.

Therefore, we are re-imagining radio design with significantly higher level of hardware integration. This is analogous to what another great hardware innovator, Apple, has done with their M1 system on a chip (SoC) that powers their new MacBook line up. Following similar design principles as us, they have integrated components tighter, increased performance and drastically improved energy efficiency, all fitting nicely in the existing form-factor of their laptops. In our radios we have created a tighter integration, replaced multiple components with one single, new physical component containing hardware, control interfaces and software (firmware). This reduces complexity and makes configuration and maintenance more self-contained.

Some examples of this integration-driven design philosophy include:

• Our power amplifier engineers design new solutions that can handle more power and bandwidth and fit into a given space by integrating several discrete blocks into one single package.
• This also applies for low level radio frequency and signal processing, which we also partly shifted it into the digital domain to utilize the latest semiconductor processing technologies.

To do this, we need to push new technology and innovative functionality into our solutions. The tighter integration increases density of the dissipated power, so we have developed new robust designs and both innovative cooling solutions and management functionality that can handle the harsh conditions. In addition, we actively work with our suppliers to find better solutions and develop ourselves what cannot be sourced.

Additionally, with new advanced functionality like beamforming and interference suppression our solution will benefit from integrating RAN Compute and the radio harder. By moving some of the RAN Compute functionality into the radio, RAN transport requirements can be reduced and the radio can adapt quicker to the constantly changing radio channel conditions. This allows for significant improvements of performance, size and energy efficiency. 

Joint RAN Compute and radio systemization and design is our way forward to future high-performance solutions in a small and attractive package.

Functionality and performance enabled by Ericsson custom silicon

Larger bandwidth carriers, multiple bands and more antenna branches drive the need for increased processing capacity and functionality in the radio. Algorithms running close to the radio, such as linearization, clipping and cancellation of passive inter-modulation become more complex. Additionally, with more antenna branches and the move towards Massive MIMO the relevance of beamforming-related functionality is increased.

In order to efficiently handle the ever-increasing need of added functionality and processing capacity, we rely on our system on a chip (SoC). The SoC is at the heart of every product and platform we bring to the market, and our SoC line-up enables us to build high performing, energy efficient and light-weight products for a wide range of deployment scenarios today and in the future.

The benefits of SoC over other chip-set technologies such as FPGA (Field-Programmable Gate Arrays) are that SoC has higher performance and allow us to optimize size, weight, energy consumption and cost, which are crucial parameters for our CSP customers.

An example of what our SoC enables is the Ericsson Uplink Booster, which we have covered in a previous blog post, which provides un-paralleled user performance and extended coverage. This unique feature of our Massive MIMO radios is just not possible without the powerful computing capabilities of our SoC. In fact, we are industry leaders in our ability to handle the most RAN software instructions per second per used watt. This is essential to deliver compute-intensive 5G features while keeping energy consumption down.

Bringing you the radio technology of the future today

Ericsson, with 79 5G live networks launched globally stands ready to expand these networks, bringing world-class connectivity to the 3.5 billion 5G subscriptions predicted in five years’ time by the Ericsson Mobility Report, and we do this with the most powerful radio portfolio in the market.

• Our wide portfolio of solutions means that we can provide the best fit to any site, for any service provider.
• Our innovative integration design means that we can pack groundbreaking technology into a formfactor that fits without compromising on performance and efficiency.
• Our SoC design unlocks 5G use cases with industry leading compute performance.

We can bring this to the market thanks to our large investments in technology and the collective brain power of engineers and researchers that together have been granted more than 54,000 patents and made more than 60,000 contributions to the 3GPP standards across 2G, 3G, 4G and 5G. During the development of 5G NR between 2016 and 2020, we have had the biggest impact on technical specifications with 37 percent of the specification text coming from contributions co-authored by Ericsson. This is almost twice the additions by any other company.

We know what it takes to build great radio systems.

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