Fujitsu Limited announced development of a millimetre-wave chip for 5G that supports multibeam multiplexing (excluding polarisation multiplexing) enabling up to four beams to be multiplexed by a single millimetre-wave chip for the radio units (RU) of 5G base stations. The development was undertaken as part of “Research and Development Project of the Enhanced Infrastructures for Post-5G Information and Communication Systems” commissioned by Japan’s New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organisation (NEDO).
With conventional technologies, a single millimetre-wave chip is used to generate a single beam, resulting in large RUs and increased power consumption. When recently developed technology is applied to actual base stations, Fujitsu demonstrated that it is possible to achieve high speed and high capacity communications of 10Gbps (gigabytes per second) or more with a half the size of a conventional RU. This allows for systems with fewer millimetre-wave chips, which thereby leads to reductions in power consumption per RU by 30%.
5G network technologies are expected to achieve higher speeds and capacity by productively utilising wireless resources in millimetre-wave band. While this approach offers potential to improve communications speed and capacity, millimetre and other high-frequency radio waves tend to be blocked by obstacles, making it difficult to communicate between great distances.
One possible approach to resolving this challenge includes covering one area with a larger number of radio base stations, which would help address issues such as need to miniaturise RUs, energy savings, and cost reductions. To address these challenges, from June 2020 to June 2023, Fujitsu Limited worked to develop technologies that enhance performance of RU under a project initiated by NEDO, which can be used in information and communications systems that support 5G.
Fujitsu’s research resulted in development of a technology that enables multiple beam multiplexing on a single chip through millimetre-wave beamforming. This will make it possible to deliver four times the speed and large capacity than a conventional RU of same size to deliver energy and cost reductions.
Kicking off development of base station hardware equipped with this technology from August 2023, Fujitsu aims to begin commercial deployment of RUs using technology globally in fiscal 2024, and contribute to spread of millimetre-wave in global market and decarbonisation of telecommunications industry.
Subsequently, beam multiplexing technology will be applied to base station (CU/DU) (centralised unit/distributed unit) products, and will be offered globally in fiscal 2025. In addition to contributing to reduction of carbon footprint of telecommunications carriers and other commercial users, Fujitsu will continue to develop technologies to advance network industry and contribute to deployment of future communications infrastructure.
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