As I mentioned last week in my blog about narrowband IoT , 4G is the standard that is used across the radio interface of most of the connected phones in the world. 4G is the fourth generation of this standard (and LTE is kind of like Rev2 of 4G), mostly dealing with the speed of the connections. Each standard each has also been marked by a break in encoding methods, which make each generation incompatible with the previous generation. 5G offers three new aspects of connectivity to your device: greater speed (to move more data), lower latency (to be more responsive), and the ability to connect a lot more devices at once (for sensors and smart devices). So things will be faster and more connected. How will we be able to tell? Sure, we’ll be able to download movies faster and won’t see “buffering…” pop up quite as often, but really, what’s the big deal? It will be a really big deal. Everything is (or Will Be) Connected When I went to CES last spring, if you can remember from my blog post back then , one of the neatest booths was the Ford Street, where the company posited what the future of cities will look like in terms of transportation, safety, and urban planning/living. From drones delivering cake to a celebratory couple at the last minute to traffic re-routing to handle a medical emergency, this future looked pretty cool. In my blog post, I wondered about the inclusion of all income levels in this idealized future, but what I didn’t talk about was my skepticism about the connectivity required to make this a reality. While the connectivity required for autonomous driving alone is such a high hurdle that I can’t see over it, how on earth can this ideal be realized using the resources we have now, in the form of 4G? I mean, Waze doesn’t even work for me one block away from my house, and I live about 35 miles from San Jose, the tech hub of the world. What made Ford think that this totally connected world is going to be reliable enough to become ubiquitous? 5G has to happen first. What Each G Means Wireless networks are mixes of various and overlapping technologies. But no matter how convoluted the acronyms, what it always boils down to the fact that wireless networks are radio systems, using radio frequencies. Way, way back before we all had mobile phones, people who really needed mobile communications installed radio telephones in their cars. In the radio-telephone system, there was one central antenna tower per city, and perhaps 25 channels available on that tower. This central antenna meant that the phone in your car needed a powerful transmitter—big enough to cover the entire area of the city. It also meant that not many people could use radio telephones at one time—there just were not enough channels. In a typical analog cell phone system, a cell phone carrier received about 800 frequencies across a city. The carrier chopped the city into cells, typically about ten square miles each. Each cell had a base station made up of a tower and radio equipment. Each cell had about 56 voice channels—that is, 56 people could be talking on a cell phone at one time. This was 1G. 2G brought digital transmission methods, resulting in more calls per cell (about 168 channels, but using the same radio bandwidth as 1G), and low-power transmitters, which allows for small batteries—which made handheld cellular phones possible. These phones were just for making phone calls; the internet and even texting weren’t really a thing yet. 3G networks began spreading in the early 2000s, and with them, came the concept of a mobile internet. With a fast connection, you could surf the Web, and play streaming audio—although the experience was sometimes maddeningly slow. With 3G, smartphones generally see download speeds of up to 2Mbps (megabits per second). Streaming was done digitally, while voice signals were still using analog. Along came 4G, which is what most of us use now on our mobile phones. Like 3G, 4G networks are IP-based (Internet protocol, not “ intellectual property ”), meaning that it uses a standard communications protocol to send and receive data in packets. Unlike 3G, 4G uses IP even (sometimes) for voice data, which only needs a surprisingly low bandwidth of 16 or 8 kbps. Speeds essentially doubled to about 3 to 5Mbps; that’s roughly the speed that many home computers receive via cable modem or DSL. My home screen on my mobile phone; circled is the proof I’m using 4G (and that have my phone on vibrate) Theoretically, this should be all we need. Of course, these speeds are a goal; in practice, they tend to be much slower (see above: Waze, not working a block away from my house). The future that the Ford Street booth at CES showed really isn’t possible even with 4G connectivity. And we as technological humans want things bigger, faster, and better, so here comes 5G. The Difference of 5G Like other cellular networks, 5G networks use a system of cell sites that divide their territory into sectors and send encoded data through radio waves. Each cell site must be connected to a network backbone. The standard will work all the way from low frequencies to high, but it gets the most benefit over 4G at higher frequencies. 5G may also transmit data over the unlicensed frequencies currently used for Wi-Fi, without conflicting with existing Wi-Fi networks. 5G networks are much more likely to be networks of smaller cells, even down to the size of home routers, than to be huge towers radiating great distances. The more cells you have, the more data you can get into the network. As I understand it, 5G weakens the importance of a central network backbone, relying instead on the network of networks. 5G has two main frequency bands, sub 6-GHz, and mmWave. mmWave has huge bandwidth for those small cells, but it cannot go through building walls. So 5G networks need to be much smarter than previous systems (they will not only enable AI for end users but will use it, as well), as they’re juggling many more, smaller cells that can change size and shape. 5G providers hope to create a network that is—in theory, anyway—able to provide download speeds of about 10,000 Mbps (megabits per second). That’s two to three times faster than current 4G networks, meaning fewer delays and even more complex and powerful smartphone apps, not to mention a fully connected world. When this baby hits 5G, we’re going to see some serious …stuff! But don’t go out and buy a 5G phone yet (and good luck finding one, at that!). The infrastructure isn’t quite in place, not to mention the pricing models have yet to be determined. Depending on the provider, 5G networks will become available anywhere between later this year to sometime in 2020. Experts are predicting a much longer deployment than we saw with 4G (a very interesting article, by the way!). People don’t want to double the price on a phone just because it has a millimeter-wave chipset on it (a required technology for the next generation). To quote the above article, “With 5G in particular, currently we have no idea why we will need 1 gigabit per second or 20 gigabits per second. If you give me 20 gigabits per second today, what additional value will I have?” Good point. More important than the new mobile phones that we’ll all be buying in the next five years, though, is the connectivity that 5G affords the world of the internet of things (IoT), which includes everything from smart refrigerators to autonomous driving technology. These things will not become ubiquitous until 5G is in place. What Does This Mean for Cadence? Well, it’s still pretty early to tell. I can say that Tensilica invested a great deal in developing IP for 4G and that the 5G network relies pretty heavily on the existing infrastructure. And according to the article linked above: The entire infrastructure will need to be overhauled for 5G. Different pieces of these networks have different challenges. … It’s an opportunity for semiconductor and device manufacturers, as well as EDA providers to provide real-time solutions of ASICs and platforms. Our customer’s new solutions need to address the complexity that 5G fronthaul and backhaul bring to the required networks. Cadence offers tools, IP, and kits to help enable 5G designs. —Meera![]()
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