By SHAWN CARPENTER, Program Director

Electronics Product Management, Ansys, www.ansys.com

The 7 Pillars of 5G/6G RF

System Design (Part 1)
Designers of 5G/6G systems must take into account the seven major “pillars” critical
to their successful creation, which center around antennas, receivers, and RF power,
among other key issues.

I
n the Old Testament’s Book of Proverbs, the first verse of data content over the wireless channel. Operating the physi-
the ninth chapter is simultaneously enigmatic and cap- cal layer reliably has implications on the total cost of owner-
tivating: “Wisdom has built her house; she has set up its ship (TCO) of the equipment, which is the single overriding
seven pillars.” The verse has been referenced frequently concern for the customer service provider (CSP) purchas-
and in a broad variety of ways over the centuries. ing, operating, and maintaining that equipment.
Regardless of how interpretations of the verse may vary, What, then, are the pillars that serve as major consider-
all reflect an underlying understanding—that creative suc- ations in 5G/6G physical-layer design?
cess requires planning, expertise, insight, inspiration, using
the proper instruments, and above all, a commitment to 1. RF power
achieve value that’s both exceptional and unique. This is usually a major driver for both the design and op-
We can logically extend the above to any endeavor in erating cost of the base station or mobile device. RF power
High Technology, and particularly to one of the leading sec- is what enables the communication system to be heard at
tors for innovation at the chip, system, and software level: increasing ranges—more RF power from the transmitter
RF communication systems in 5G/6G. At the heart of these usually results in more range.
communications systems lies the physical layer, involving RF power received by a mobile device is usually a com-
modulation, transmission, and de-modulation of signal and bination of the base-station transmitter power and the rela-

This 5G base-station
diagram is a telescoped
system view with electro-
magnetic capture. (Cour-
tesy of Ansys)

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 This 5G antenna array
showing active radiation
was captured using EM
field capture by Ansys
HFSS. (Courtesy of
Ansys)

tive directivity of the antenna on each end. This leads to an may reduce radiation efficiency—power loss that must be
interesting tradeoff between an antenna’s ability to focus the made up by increasing power at the expense of battery life.
RF power that’s radiated, and the RF power generated in Mobile device antennas also are subject to strict emissions
the antenna. Generating RF power also results in generat- standards for personal health, safety, and coexistence with
ing heat, which leads to other multi-physics challenges like other RF systems.
mechanical expansion and stress.
Allowable RF power radiated by an access point or device 3. Antenna agility and beamforming
is subject to regulatory control, too, which governs topics Antennas form the interface that matches the radio
like exposure safety and potential for interference to other electronics to the physical environment, which forms the
RF systems. wireless channel. Choose that antenna poorly, and the
receiver on the other end of the channel will fail to detect
2. Antenna sizing the signal. Design the antenna well, and you can minimize
There’s nothing trivial about deciding how big an antenna the cost you invest in both the transmitter and the receiver.
will be. In general, a larger antenna will exhibit higher Antenna systems composed of many antenna elements
directivity, and it can offer an operational RF link with lower (phased arrays) offer the ability to shape the way RF power
RF power than a smaller antenna. Indeed, base-station is physically projected into the environment. By using
antenna systems consist of multi-element antenna arrays, techniques such as polarization diversity and beamforming,
leading to beamforming capabilities that enable the antenna we can enhance the number of simultaneous pathways for
to focus the signals spatially on subscribers. These antenna RF signals to traverse the environment to serve more users
systems may be arbitrarily large, but considerations such with better throughput.
as wind loading, tower mount weighting, and multi-band Methodologies like multi-user massive multi-input/
service also drive size and weight considerations. multi-output (MU-mMIMO) are gaining traction in
Heavier antenna systems require more costly towers and enabling base-station arrays and mobile devices to support
installation mount points. Larger arrays with more elements high levels of service. These agility techniques don’t
require more supply power, driving up the operational come for free—they require a great deal more baseband
electric bill. Generation and distribution of RF power processing, putting pressure on the power and complexity
across these arrays can be costly, and they will incur power of the packaged digital and RF electronics within the base
loss from source to antenna that must be made up by the station or mobile device.
RF transmitter. Passive cooling and heatsinks must be
considered in the overall size and weight. 4. RF bandwidth
Antennas in mobile devices must fit tight form-factor It’s true—there’s a direct relationship between the
requirements, which often drive difficult design and bandwidth of an RF communication channel and the
integration challenges. Further, the package integration amount of data that can be sent over it. Double the RF

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 waveform, signal-to-noise and signal-
to-interference ratios in the channel,
and the transmission symbol rates
employed in both time and frequency
division.
It’s an area of extensive research.
In 6G systems, it may be possible for
future RF systems to dynamically adjust
their waveforms through artificial
intelligence and machine learning (AI/
ML) to reactively counter dynamic
wireless channel behavior as the physical
environment changes and as users (or
other independent bodies) move.

6. Receiver design
Shown is smartphone antenna-array common positioning on a device frame. (Courtesy of Good receivers have two salient
Ansys) characteristics: they detect weak signals,
and they reject unwanted signals
channel bandwidth and you double the data that can be (interference). Today’s receivers are increasingly digital,
sent over it. Expanding bandwidth leads to new challenges and architectures are coming forward that place one at
acutely felt by the RF and antenna system designer. each base-station element or at sub-groups of elements for
Compact, efficient antennas are naturally narrowband enhanced flexibility.
devices—they must be carefully designed to be efficient Mobile device receivers must contend with noisy RF
radiators over wide bandwidths, or multiple antenna environments, small and inefficient form factors for
systems will be required to serve each band (another integration and must operate continually to monitor the
tradeoff!). Availability of wideband RF channels is scarce channel for incoming calls or targeted data. Low-noise RF
at low microwave frequencies, but more widely available front ends often require high current bias, making continual
at mid-microwave and mmWave frequencies (where operation an enemy of the battery.
wideband is easier to manage in a fractional bandwidth of
carrier frequency sense). 7. Bespoke wireless channel modeling
Higher-frequency systems require more cost and care Legacy RF communication systems employed in 3G and
to design and exhibit reduced power-added efficiency (the 4G systems have been constrained to bands < 2500 MHz. The
ability of the transmitter to efficiently convert supply power past 40 years of wireless telecommunications have provided
to RF power). Wider bandwidths drive the need for digital us with voluminous measurement data for characterizing
receivers to sample at considerably higher rates, leading to RF wireless propagation through dense urban and terrestrial
elevated power consumption, more digital data to process, settings.
and added complexity to the packaged electronics in the At these frequencies, signals tend to propagate with
baseband processor. reasonable predictability through and around buildings
and terrain. Many proven empirical and statistical channel
5. RF waveform selection models have provided RF communication system designers
Developing RF systems to leverage an available or with the utility they need to test RF chain and signal-
licensed bandwidth is one thing, but how that spectrum is processing concepts.
used is another. The RF modulation technique (how we put As 5G and 6G systems arise, they’re using high-frequency
information onto an RF carrier for transmission) will drive bands where RF propagation models are less reliable.
a metric called “spectrum efficiency.” Higher frequencies make wider bandwidths possible and
Spectrum efficiency is usually expressed in bits/hertz (b/ usable. The environment becomes more reflective and less
Hz, or b/MHz), and tells us something about how much penetrable by RF signals, leading to stronger multi-path and
digital data our RF system can push through the available RF diffraction effects. Propagation losses mount over physical
channel bandwidth at a prescribed error rate. This depends distance with increasing frequency, leading to the need for
on factors like the digital modulation scheme, the number larger antennas.
and spacing of reference or data subcarriers used in the The lack of reliable wireless channel models at higher

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frequencies necessitates modeling the physics of RF Shawn Carpenter received his BEE degree
scattering at the specific bas- station location, and to the in electrical engineering from the Univer-
locations of subscribers (and interferers). With accurate sity of Minnesota Institute of Technol-
wireless channel modeling customized to a specific location, ogy in 1988, and an MSEE in Electrical
telecom system providers can customize all aspects of a Engineering from Syracuse University in
wireless access point for the lowest total cost of ownership. 1991 concurrently with the General Elec-
This would optimize all six of our previous categories to tric Thomas Edison Advanced Course in
meet key performance indicators for minimum total design Engineering program. He has served as
and operational cost. a Senior Microwave Engineer in Module
Design and Array Technology for the GE
What’s the Prognosis? Aerospace Electronics Laboratory (Syracuse, NY), VP Sales
One can readily discern that these pillars are significantly and Marketing for Sonnet Software Inc., and Director, Sales &
more complex in terms of instantiation than for most prob- Marketing for Delcross Technologies.
lems because of their evident dynamic interactivity and Shawn joined Ansys Inc. during the 2015 acquisition of Del-
interdependence. Furthermore, many advanced design op- cross Technologies and is currently a Program Director for 5G
tions and their attendant issues are subject to significant re- and Space applications. His current interests include phased-
percussions from these primary design pillars. array modeling techniques for MIMO and adaptive beam-
Such repercussions include channel latencies, the “den- forming, installed antenna-host interactions, mmWave radar
sification” of hierarchical networks (from femtocells and sensor modeling, and wireless physical channel modeling for
microcells up to base stations and the extension to air- and electrically large environments. He’s also an active amateur
space-based non-terrestrial/satellite nodes), edge process- radio (ham) operator with the callsign N2JET, embracing a
ing, the downstream impact on 6G, implications for optical hobby he adopted at age 11.
backhaul and consequences to processing support (includ-
ing asymmetric heterogeneous multiprocessing), to name a
few.
With all this in mind, what is the path of wisdom a design
team should follow for building the pillars for a house such
as this? We will discuss them all in a series of articles that
will give each topic justice. The next installment of this series
will detail the first pillar described above: RF Power.
If you want to learn more about the role of Computational
Electromagnetic simulation in 5G system design, click here.

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