This cutting-edge foundry technology is expected to provide a ‘one chip solution,’ specifically for 5G communications with support for multi-channel and multi-antenna chip designs. Samsung’s 8nm RF platform extension is expected to expand the company’s leadership in the 5G semiconductor market from sub-6GHz to mmWave applications.

Samsung’s 8nm RF process technology is the latest addition to an already broad portfolio of RF-related solutions, including 28nm- and 14nm-based RF. The company has established its RF market leadership through the shipping of more than 500 million mobile RF chips for premium smartphones since 2017.

“Through excellence in innovation and process manufacturing, we’ve reinforced our next-generation wireless communication offerings,” said Hyung Jin Lee, Master of Foundry Technology Development Team at Samsung Electronics. “As 5G mmWave expands, Samsung’s 8nm RF will be a great solution for customers looking for long battery life and excellent signal quality on compact mobile devices.”

Samsung’s New RFeFET Architecture

With continued scaling to advanced nodes, digital circuits have improved significantly in performance, power consumption, and area (PPA), whereas the analog/RF blocks haven’t enjoyed such an improvement due to degenerative parasitics such as increased resistance from narrow line width. As a result, most communications chips tend to see degraded RF characteristics such as deteriorated amplification performance of reception frequency and increased power consumption.

To overcome the analog/RF scaling challenges, Samsung has developed a unique architecture exclusive to 8nm RF named RFextremeFET (RFeFET) that can significantly improve RF characteristics while using less power. In comparison to 14nm RF, Samsung’s RFeFET supplements the digital PPA scaling and restores the analog/RF scaling at the same time, thereby enabling high-performance 5G platforms.

Samsung’s process optimization maximizes channel mobility while minimizing parasitics. As the performance of RFeFET is greatly improved, the total number of transistors of RF chips and the area of analog/RF blocks can be reduced.

Compared to 14nm RF, Samsung’s 8nm RF process technology provides up to a 35-percent increase in power efficiency with a 35-percent decrease in the RF chip area as a result of the RFeFET architectural innovation.

“This achievement is solid proof of Samsung’s ability to channel its technical expertise from multiple business areas into important industry breakthroughs,” said Paul Kyungwhoon Cheun, Executive Vice President and Head of Next Generation Business Team at Samsung Electronics. “We are very focused on developing technologies that improve and accelerate the realization of a new generation of mobile networks and devices. Samsung will continue to increase its momentum in the development of exciting new 5G technologies.”

With these RF technologies, Samsung developed a new case-integrated antenna, which incorporates dozens of antenna elements in a module that is less than 1mm thick – a critical step towards engineering both compact small cell base stations and user devices.

Samsung also developed industry-leading efficient power amplifiers for use with mmWave signals to drive each antenna. These power amplifiers – the primary point of energy consumption in the radio module of a device – convert the low-power signal of a device into a high-power signal suitable for transmission over the air. Samsung’s breakthrough power amplifiers simultaneously double output power and improve energy efficiency by more than 50 percent.

Across the industry, current prototype base stations and devices are generally large pieces of equipment – base stations typically occupy a full cabinet, while devices must often be mounted on the tops of vans or trucks for testing. While bulky prototypes are common during the early stages of network technology research, miniaturization and efficiency scaling are a critical requirement for the development of commercial equipment and devices.

Size is particularly critical for 5G devices, as the peak and average throughputs of next-generation networks are expected to be on the gigabit-scale, where radio signal processing and power consumption can be very high without appropriately efficient technologies. Also, due to the naturally short range of the high frequency mmWave spectrum, network coverage strategies will likely require dense deployments of 5G small cells mounted in inconspicuous locations on walls and utility poles. These small cells thus need to be as small, light and efficient as possible.

Samsung Electronics has announced a series of milestone 5G technology developments since research began in 2013, when the company recorded the world’s first gigabit per second throughput benchmarks using next-generation prototype technologies. In 2014, Samsung surprised the industry by achieving consistent 1.2Gbps throughputs at speeds of 110km/h. Most recently, Samsung became the first vendor to move beyond a focus on throughputs, with an announcement of the world’s first handover demonstration in a multi-cell mmWave network.