UCI Engineers Design Chip That’s 4X Faster at Processing Data Than 5G

While most of the world is currently looking to implement 5G networks, electrical engineers at the University of California, Irvine have designed a chip that performs four-times faster than what the 5G communication standard can deliver. The ‘Beyond 5G’ 4.4-millimeter-square end-to-end transmitter-receiver features a digital/analog architecture that’s capable of operating at 100GHz and above, which is striking considering 5G operates in the 28 to 38GHz spectrum.

“We call our chip ‘beyond 5G’ because the combined speed and data rate that we can achieve is two orders of magnitude higher than the capability of the new wireless standard. In addition, operating in a higher frequency means that you and I and everyone else can be given a bigger chunk of the bandwidth offered by carriers.” — Payam Heydari, NCIC (Nanoscale Communication Integrated Circuit Labs) Director

Having transmitters and receivers that are capable of handling higher frequencies will be necessary with the onset of IoT devices, autonomous vehicles, as well as high-definition streaming services, and more. While those applications increasingly rely on increasing fast communication technology, there are roadblocks in developing integrated circuits that can handle the load, especially when it comes to changing the frequency signals of modulation and demodulation, which have traditionally been a job for digital processing.

According to Moore’s Law, engineers should be able to increase transistor speed by decreasing their size, however, Heydari states that’s not the case anymore, “You cannot break electrons in two, so we have approached the levels that are governed by the physics of semiconductor devices.” To get around that issue, the engineers designed a chip architecture that significantly offloads the digital processing requirements over to the analog, which modulates the digital bits, as well as the radio frequency domains.

By utilizing both digital and analog technologies, the chip can handle those high frequencies, and the transceivers unique architecture reduces the amount of energy needed for throughput over the 5G, at a reduced cost as well.