Anokiwave Behind the Curtain - Part 1 - mmW Market Drivers

	Pete Moosbrugger
	5G, SATCOM, Active Antennas

Our goal is to make our customers successful – we do this by listening to our customers, partnering with them, and releasing products that make their radios work.

5G and SATCOM communications are changing the way in which we communicate and paving paths to extraordinary opportunities.

For the 5G market, a new ecosystem is emerging that will lay the foundations for global technological progress. While its predecessors (2G, 3G, 4G) were brownfield developments entailing upgrades or additions to existing network infrastructure, 5G is a greenfield deployment comprising the installation and configuration of a brand-new network.

While the mmW 5G market is expected to see exponential growth in the next 4 years due increasing demand for data, the satellite communications industry is poised for explosive growth with multiple high-capacity systems either already on-orbit or planned for the near future with a mission to provide broadband service to every corner of the world.

Anokiwave has been leading the 5G game since before standards existed and has led the SATCOM user terminal markets with high-performance, cost-effective ICs since 2016. We have been actively solving the challenges associated with mmW systems in collaboration with our customers and partners to reach new, exciting products that make mmW 5G easy for OEMs to adopt.

This is a four-part series that looks behind the curtain at Anokiwave to see the magic behind our solutions and what makes us stand apart from others.

Part 1 – mmW Market Drivers

Anokiwave has always been a market innovator; our IC technologies have been used to enable mmW radio systems since 2016 and are the underpinnings of a large portion of deployed systems today. Since then, each year Anokiwave has released new generations of silicon ICs in all mmW 5G bands, all of which are in volume production and used by industry’s leading players in fielded radios.

Anokiwave is dedicated to enabling OEMs stay one step ahead, using key mmW innovations to provide critical market solutions with the goal to make our customers successful. We take feedback from our customers and understand the radio requirements and incorporate features to make our customer’s radios better.

In this blog, we describe three key drivers in the mmW 5G market and the way in which Anokiwave addresses those needs.

Market Driver #1: Wide mmW coverage with low DC power for small form factor radios
Anokiwave Solution: ICs that provide a combination of industry’s highest DC efficiency and linear power

We consistently hear feedback requiring higher efficiency and higher levels of integration. We were the first company to release a quad beamformer IC to the market in 2016 and that has become the industry standard which has allowed a scalable use of an IC architecture for Active Antenna applications.

Fast-forward to 2022, as the world is moving to the vision of a net-zero emissions future, and mmW 5G is being deployed on a wide scale, there is a growing need for radios that are low in DC power and can be easily mounted on existing structures like light poles. Customers want radios that reduce the total radio DC power consumption and dissipation, without compromising the coverage footprint and are unobtrusive. This is a challenging problem to solve but Anokiwave solves it by providing a unique combination of industry’s highest DC power efficiency and linear output power performance per beamformer IC. Since the beamformer ICs make up a large portion of the overall thermal budget, this leads to a significant reduction in overall DC power. As a result, together, the system ends up needing fewer ICs and with lower DC power per IC.

In this blog, we describe three key drivers in the mmW 5G market and the way in which Anokiwave addresses those needs.

Market Driver #2: Low cost and simpler designs for wide commercial deployments
Anokiwave Solution: Highest level of integration and performance to reduce part count and design complexity

With the Gen-4 IC family, Anokiwave offers unprecedented levels of integration for mmW signal chains enabling OEMS to now build an entire mmW to IF signal chain with just two IC types. In addition to an integrated 4 x 2 beamformer IC, the new Gen-4 ICs such as the AWMF-0224 integrate two IF up/down converters, a distribution IC, and an entire PLL/VCO synthesizer into one IC. That’s 5 RF functions in one IC, while providing wideband coverage without compromising performance.

Some of the improvements we have added over the generations include features that have allowed our customers to minimize or eliminate calibration at the antenna level, offering significant cost savings to the customer. Through our generational learning over the last 6 years, we have delivered more than 95% total cost of ownership reduction to our customers, and a simplicity of design with our integration levels and system level support.

In this blog, we describe three key drivers in the mmW 5G market and the way in which Anokiwave addresses those needs.

Market Driver #3: Deliver a complete mmW solution in volume for a one stop shop for 5G radio design
Anokiwave Solution: Delivering industry leading ICs from mmW to IF, supporting antenna designs, and enabling baseband partnership for a full radio solution

mmW phased array technology is a very challenging technology; our goal is to take the mmW complexity out of the equation, allowing our customers to design and operate their arrays as if they are sub-6 GHz modules in which they are plugging into their systems.

Since 2016, Anokiwave has been a trusted supplier of mmW ICs for a large portion of the mmW 5G systems that have been deployed worldwide. As the market matures and new entrants come to the market, there is a growing need to provide enabling solutions beyond the ICs. Anokiwave has continued to push the limits of innovation and today provides:

A complete mmW to IF solution for every 5G band with highest levels of integration
Scalable architecture that can be easily scaled to meet the needs of multiple 5G use cases such as Consumer Premises Equipment (CPE), repeaters, small cells, and infrastructure systems
System level lineup and algorithms to optimize a complete mmW 5G signal chain for specific use cases
Support for mmW active antenna designs to allow customers to accelerate their antenna developments
Options to partner with multiple baseband partners for a 5G radio solution, so customers are not locked into a specific ecosystem

Our goal is to make our customers successful – we do this by listening to our customers, partnering with them, and releasing products that make their radios work.

For additional information on our 5G products, tools, and resources, please visit our 5G page or schedule a meeting with us at IMS2022 to learn more.

Read part 2 of this series describing the benefits of our latest 5G family.