Nanusens announced that it has used its pioneering MEMS-within-CMOS™ technology to create a new solution to the challenge of creating a better RF front-end for 6G.
The problem is that 6G needs to be able to handle more frequencies than 5G, and potentially higher frequencies. To achieve this, additional antennas need to be integrated into the phone to handle more bands, but they need to get smaller to fit more inside the phone, which reduces efficiency. To get the best possible performance from each antenna, each antenna needs to be reconfigured for a different band and tuned to avoid mismatches with the power amplifier. This is currently done by tunable capacitors.
Using patented, silicon-proven technology that uses standard CMOS techniques to build MEMS structures, the company has created thousands of digitally tunable nanoscale capacitors within the CMOS layer of the chip, simultaneously with the control circuitry. This single-chip integrated solution is smaller and has superior linearity, resulting in virtually zero distortion, providing far superior performance than competing solutions. Additionally, the nanocapacitors are highly power efficient, improving talk time by up to 30%, solving current efficiency problems.
These RF Digitally Tunable Capacitors (DTC) also solve the problem that current antenna solutions consume more and more power at higher frequency bands. The key is a very high Q factor of over 100 at 1GHz. More importantly, the Q factor remains high up to higher bands with very low power dissipation that causes the Q factor of competitive products to drop significantly. The practical result is an improved user experience with approximately 14% or more increased range and fewer dropped calls and areas of poor reception.
Josep Montaña, CEO of Nanuses
This is an extension of our work to build on our commitment to using our proprietary technology to enable cost-effective use of the upper 5G spectrum. We have provided test chips for this to our customers and they have been impressed with the performance and have actually advised us to use this technology to create solutions for 6G as well, as the industry is really challenged by it.
Mark Lamas, CTO of Nanusense
Our unique solution for 5G and 6G RF front-end is exciting leading RF companies who need a better solution. We believe this is the RF front-end solution they have been looking for to enable the full launch of the 6G market. It is suitable for telephony but also other applications in industry and automotive, with significantly lower latency and data rates of 1000 gigabits per second, 50 times faster than 5G. This is a huge potential 6G market measured in hundreds of millions of new devices per year. It is driven by the rapidly growing need for data-intensive applications such as AI, virtual reality, augmented reality and IoT. Our unique technology, which simply uses standard CMOS techniques in any CMOS fab, allows us to produce virtually unlimited volumes to meet this demand.
