With the 5G wave, it’s time to upgrade RF filters!

兰博

With the 5G wave, it’s time to upgrade RF filters! [Copy link]

The 5G wave has swept in, causing a strong impact on the development of almost all walks of life. While smart manufacturing, smart finance, smart medical care, etc. are accelerating their implementation, the manufacturing and packaging of related components have also entered people's field of vision, and the attention to RF chips and RF filters remains high.
With a smartphone in hand, you can communicate with your relatives and friends in real time. As one of the important indicators of mobile phones, communication performance has become an important breakthrough for Chinese mobile phone manufacturers to improve the competitiveness of their products. As the core components of mobile phone communication systems, RF chips and filters are responsible for RF transceiver, frequency synthesis, power amplification, etc., and their role is self-evident.
The development of global RF front-end devices is in a stage of rapid growth. According to market research institutions, filters account for the largest proportion in the RF front-end market. It is expected that by 2023, the global filter market share will grow to US$22.5 billion, compared with US$9.2 billion in 2018, and will grow at a high compound annual growth rate of 19%.
5G's high-speed communication rate and huge communication capacity have posed new challenges to RF chips, promoting the continuous upgrading of RF front-end chip technology and the outbreak of market demand. From the perspective of application scenarios, RF chips are mainly used in mobile terminal devices such as mobile phones and tablets, and together with antennas, transceivers, baseband chips, etc., they constitute communication chips.
As the core part of wireless communication, the RF front end (RFFE) includes the transmit channel and the receive channel, and is composed of devices such as power amplifiers (PAs), low-noise amplifiers (LNAs), switches, duplexers, filters and harmonic wave filters. Among them, the RF front-end devices are all prepared by semiconductor processes. The power amplifiers and low-noise amplifiers used on mobile phones are mainly based on Si, SOI, GaN, GaAs, and SiGe (the high-power power amplifiers used on base stations mainly use GaN and GaAs).
With the gradual implementation of 4G and 5G frequency bands, the application support of MIMO and carrier aggregation, and the popularization of wireless technologies such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and GPS, The demand for RF filters has grown rapidly. During use, RF filters can reduce out-of-band interference and improve the performance of nearby equipment. RF filters only allow the frequency and channel that users actually send and receive to pass through, while reducing interference signals outside the channel.
The problems in design, materials, tools, processes, production, testing, and packaging that China encountered in the development of traditional semiconductors will also be encountered in the development of RF front-end devices, and there are many challenges. This requires all parties in the industry chain to strive for excellence rather than size, and strive to work harder in the field of core technology research and development, and strive to find a smooth road for the development of RF front-end devices.
It is foreseeable that as people's needs for communication such as taking pictures, voice, and video become increasingly urgent, various functions of smartphones will also be improved faster, and the demand for electronic components such as RF chips and RF filters will rise accordingly. As one of the core components of mobile phone communication systems, RF filters will become another "big cake" for manufacturers to grab.

qwqwqw2088

In the 5G wave, it is not just about upgrading RF filters

石榴姐

How much does it cost to upgrade the RF filter?