Differentiated Silicon Technologies for mmwave 5G and 6G applications (Invited)

The mobile broadband (MBB) connectivity based on 4G and 5G cellular connectivity has enabled high data throughput and low latency applications on smart mobile devices. The enhanced MBB (eMBB) using 5G particularly mmwave frequency bands has the capability of further enhancing data rate to true multi-Gb/s. While mmwave (24-52GHz) allows huge channel bandwidth to enable enhanced broadband, it also poses a lot of technical challenges in terms of coverage, efficient generation of transmitted power particularly in the uplink, system cost and long-term reliability of the hardware system. In future, carrier frequencies will go even higher to >100GHz particularly D-band (120-160GHz) for both communication and sensing. This paper highlights the hardware challenges for sub 6GHz, mmwave and sub-THz radio and performance limits of semiconductor technologies particularly CMOS compared to different compound semiconductor technologies.