Innovation in Specialty Silicon Technology for 5G Front-End Modules

The wireless data bandwidth needed to fulfill the promise of 5G imposes new performance requirements on the underlying specialty silicon technologies such as RF SOI and SiGe BiCMOS used in the front-ends of user equipment (UE), small cells and base stations. In this article, we review recent advancements in these platforms thc4t support key 5G components like massive MIMO (mMIMO), the increased use of carrier aggregation, lower latency, beamforming and higher receive (Rx) sensitivity, all applicable to both the sub-6 GHz and mmWave spectrum.