Wang Zhiqin: HiSilicon Balong5000 chip is the first to complete comprehensive testing

At the 2019 (and 7th) IMT-2020(5G) Summit held today, Wang Zhiqin, leader of the IMT-2020(5G) Promotion Group, said in his speech that this year's key work will promote the development of terminal chips' industrial capabilities to support NSA and SA. Currently, Huawei HiSilicon's balong5000 chip has taken the lead in completing comprehensive testing for SA and NSA.

Wang Zhiqin said that after completing the equipment test, the focus this year is to promote the development of the industry's capabilities of terminal chips to support NSA and SA. The test involved four 5G chips and six 5G system devices, supporting both NSA and SA networking architectures, with two main frequency bands: 3.5GHz and 2.6GHz.

According to Wang Zhiqin, terminal chip testing is divided into two parts: one is the test of the terminal chip itself, and the other is the interoperability between the chip and the system. Both are based on the 3GPP R15 standard, which is the December 2018 version.

In terms of indoor testing, it includes NSA and SA testing, frequency band bandwidth and frame structure, as well as wireless interface layer 1 to layer 3 protocols and flexible scheduling.

In terms of outdoor testing, at the Huairou test site, each manufacturer has a small-scale test network to conduct a comprehensive test on throughput, latency, including the success rate of many services and long-term maintenance performance.

Wang Zhiqin introduced the test completion status of four 5G baseband chips. Among them, Huawei HiSilicon's balong5000 chip is designed for SA and NSA, and has completed all indoor and outdoor tests. Qualcomm's main chip involved in the test is the Snapdragon X50 chip, which is designed for NSA and has also completed comprehensive indoor and outdoor tests. MediaTek's Helio M70 chip is designed for SA and NSA, and has completed all indoor tests. Outdoor performance tests are also in progress. Unisoc's Springtide 510 test is starting.

In terms of interoperability testing of terminal chips and systems, Wang Zhiqin said that HiSilicon has completed testing for a large number of manufacturers, Qualcomm is mainly in the NSA field, and has a comprehensive coverage of testing work for various manufacturers indoors and outdoors, especially some commissioning with Samsung. MediaTek and Unisoc also have outstanding cooperation with some manufacturers.

Wang Zhiqin pointed out that from the perspective of test content, the first is the test of the peak throughput of a single indoor terminal. From the overall test results, after a period of adjustment, the terminal chips can generally achieve a transmission performance of more than 80% of the theoretical peak. The chip products of the three manufacturers, in 3.5G, whether NSA or SA, the downlink peak rate is basically 1.3 to 1.5Gbps. The downlink of 2.6GHz in both modes is around 1.5 to 1.8Gbps. The downlink peaks of NSA and SA are basically the same.

In terms of uplink transmission performance, in the 3.5G frequency band, the uplink peak speed is 170Mbps in NSA mode, and it will be improved to more than 270Mbps in SA. The same result is true in 2.6G, where NSA is 130Mbps and SA can be improved to more than 160Mbps. Wang Zhiqin said that in SA mode, uplink can achieve dual streams, and the speed is significantly improved.

Wang Zhiqin said that the actual peak rate test conducted in the field is a good verification of the indoor results from the perspective of the overall performance conditions. The downlink can reach a download rate of gigabit level, and the uplink is basically 100 megabits. Under NSA conditions, the downlink is 1.0 to 1.4Gbps, and SA is basically at this value. The uplink is different. The uplink NSA is 100 to 170Mbps, and SA can reach 240 to 280Mbps.