Evaulation_Engineering_March_2020 - 28

RF/MICROWAVE TEST

WIDEBAND TRANSCEIVER SUPPORTS
MULTISTANDARD 3G/4G/5G BASESTATION APPLICATIONS
By Rick Nelson, Contributing Technical Editor
Base-station developers face a variety
of challenges as 5G arrives, according
to Peadar Forbes, marketing and applications director at Analog Devices. New 5G
networks will need to support three use
cases-extreme mobile broadband
(eMBB), massive machine communication, and ultrareliable low-latency communication. Mobile broadband users will
expect 100-Mb/s data rates wherever
needed with peak rates extending to more
than 10 Gb/s. And broadband 5G networks will serve 10 to 100 times more
devices and experience 10,000 times more
tra f f ic, compa red w ith prev ious
generations.
Massive machine communications will
require low-cost, low-power implementations that allow devices to operate on
batteries for 10 years or more. And ultrareliable communication applications will
require latencies of 1 ms or lower.
Forbes said Analog Devices' base-station customers experience several pain
points with respect to time to market and
a huge increase in portfolio complexity
and cost pressures. They are contending
with multiple variants with respect to
formfactors, frequency ranges, software
variants, and antenna count, with highdensity radios putting pressure on system
size, weight, and power (SWaP).

Wideband transceiver
To help meet the challenges, Analog
Devices in November 2019 introduced

EVALUATION ENGINEERING MARCH 2020

Analog
Devices' ADRV9026
wideband
transceiver, part
of the company's
RadioVerse design
and technology
ecosystem.

a new wideband transceiver in its
RadioVerse1 design and technology ecosystem. The ADRV9026 is designed to
support base-station applications including single and multistandard 3G/4G/5G
macrocell base stations as well a massive
MIMO (M-MIMO) and small-cell systems.
Forbes called the ADRV9026 the smallest, lowest power transceiver for basestation applications, describing it as a
highly integrated, high-performance
software-defined radio. Applications, he
said, include macrocells, small cells, and

massive MIMO architectures. He further
described it as a common-platform design
for 3G and 4G as well as 5G-thereby reducing complexity, development cost, and
time to market.
Forbes said the ADRV9026 offers
twice the integration and half of the
power consumption of its predecessor,
the ADRV9009. He said the ADRV9026
also supports FDD and TDD on a single
chip to simplify development, whereas the
ADRV9009 implementation required two
chips for FDD.

Evaulation_Engineering_March_2020

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Evaulation_Engineering_March_2020