Shitalkumar Joshi, Technical Director, Electrical and Electronics – India, Ansys.
The 5G opportunity is truly game changing. Advanced communications systems will deliver a new entertainment experience, serve as the backbone of intelligent autonomous mobility, revolutionize healthcare, and propel manufacturing into a new era of smart connected factories and products. Within a decade, people worldwide are expected to be consuming 20 times more data than today. As a result, the pressure is on to be first to market with reliable, safe and affordable 5G-enabled technology that delivers the highest level quality of service.
Companies – established players and startups – are racing to capture the 5G market opportunity and they know that their future success depends on the critical technology decisions they make today. Engineering teams are the key to unlocking this enormous potential.
What are Ansys focus areas to help develop and deployed 5G system?
The opportunity before 5G innovators is almost unlimited, but critical market demands must be overcome by those who want to win the race to market. To do so, 5G leaders are using integrated simulation-based product development approach to achieve following critical success factors
Scalability and User Density
It is anticipated that a 5G network must be capable of serving billions of users through trillions of terminals. This will push electronics complexity to unprecedented levels, driven by: new frequency bands, including mm-wave, thermal and power management, carrier aggregation leading to more electronics in RF front-end (RFFE); base station and handheld antennas need beamforming technologies to create directional radiation pattern gains; and systems must safely overcome human body interactions and serve many moving subscribers. The dense packaging of electronics must handle signal integrity, power integrity, thermal management, electronics reliability and consistent radio frequency (RF) performance, all potentially making maintenance more costly and more difficult.
Latency
Delivering an order of magnitude improvement with the drive to 1ms to cater to Realtime safety critical application like autonomous.
Broadband User Experience
It is expected that 5G will deliver a 10 times improvement in speeds over 4G, with peak speeds anticipated to exceed 1Gbps.
Reliability and Security
5G will need to meet industry standards, such as 3GPP, and “always on” connectivity for critical use case applications. These new technologies carry significant engineering implications to ensure that signal integrity, power integrity, electromagnetic interference (EMI), electromagnetic compatibility (EMC), cost and performance requirements are met, to offer low-cost, low-power high-reliability systems and components.
Edge Capabilities
In order for 5G networks to obtain the 1ms latency target for critical applications such as AI operations at the cell site, AR/VR, Autonomous Vehicles, Smart Cities, and emergency response systems, the compute capabilities previously provided by distant datacenters need to be pushed closer to the user. To do this, Edge network applications are being designed into 5G networks. These mini servers can be designed into micro and picocells placed around urban environments or larger edge systems placed directly at the cell site. These edge enabled small cell systems, combined with a large network capacity increase via implementation of Massive MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output) at large base stations, will allow for enormous amounts of data to be passed quickly between the Edge Cells, thereby helping to bring heavy data processing and rapid data response times to the user.
Spectral Efficiency
Driving towards >30 bits/s/Hz to maximize use of bandwidth availability within new frequency bands
What are the best practices for developing reliable 5G solutions?
Communication systems are evolving as technology is growing from Analog beamforming 40 years back then hybrid and digital beamforming technologies have made the system robust, accurate and fast in recent times. There are three sections where technologists are focusing to implement practices for developing reliable 5G systems.
Design Development of Chip package system and SI/PI analysis of High bit rate systems
In 5G communication system multiple users establishes communication over the network where baseband data at user needs to be process data at extremely high speed with accuracy (BER*). Technologies are evolving on high data rate transmission with minimum no. of design cycles. A robust SI/PI analysis provides a flexibility to design and analyze the digital high speed board designs and optimize it for best possible parameters (Data Rate, BER). With multiple bands and channels, there is a high chance of channel disturbances due to radiation /emissions of all the systems, which are analyzed using conducted and radiated emissions studies.
Furthermore, SoC designs for very high frequencies are measure of analysis of all advance silicon nm nodes with multiple EM solvers as well as performing 3DIC analysis which helps to achieve technology level scaling then verify performance of extremely high data rate signals such as SERDES and DDR5. And to operate the high-speed digital design it is even important to suppress power noise and voltage fluctuations seen by chip applications (EMI and noise).
RF System, Antenna, RFI and EMI Analysis
Deployment of systema and component level analysis for RF Design in 5G communication is continuously growing with respect to no. of channels, frequency range and channel bandwidth, etc. Designing of multi-band/multi-antenna elements with beamforming and massive (MIMO) implementations in a compact & loaded platform, Interference between antennas and circuitry, cable susceptibility to environment, Channel modelling are the identified challenges in RF design of 5G comm for which comprehensive simulation based approach is being used by industry.
Specification on system design, PA technology, selection of filter, other components for several specs and architecture of transceiver, tuning and optimization of the RF subsystem are critical factors being studied in virtual environment for design and implementation of 5G comm. systems
Multiphysics Analysis of 5G Systems
Electro-thermal analysis of temperature-dependent performance of electronics, thermally induced warpage, delamination, component failure, solder joint fatigue, etc. are important challenges. A comprehensive Multiphysics studies can helps mitigating risks of failure and contribute towards robust design of the system
In summary, an integrated multi-scale multi-domain and multiphysics simulations are being deployed to ensure the reliable performance of 5G networks.
What are the reliability, power, and other issues faced while developing these solutions?
Simulation allows earlier analysis of chip power consumption which leads to unprecedented efficiency and first-pass design scenarios. The simulations are crucial to account for the temperature-dependent performance of electronics and gauge the lifetime and reliability prediction for safety-critical applications. Accurate temperature prediction of highly integrated design from chip to system level
Apart from reliability and power issues, environmental effects, wind loading, solar loading etc. are the challenges which are dealt with Ansys capabilities like EM-thermal-mechanical coupled simulation workflows, thermal stress, mechanical deformation simulations. Along with integration of chip-level with package/board/system level Multiphysics workflows.
What are the implications of 5G for IoT and smart connected products?
5G deployment will take place in phases. A significant economic and social value can be generated by enabling use cases activated by 5G. The functional drivers like ultra-low latency, intelligent machines, edge computing, high processing and power will enable gambit of use cases. A few critical ones are listed here:
- Remote Healthcare: 5G technology will enable healthcare systems to provide improved remote monitoring for patients.
- Enhanced agricultural productivity enabled by IoT based real-time data gathering, analytics and decision making.
- Transportation and Logistics Sector: Some of the important functions are vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V): This is where vehicles transmit signals to each other, vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I): here vehicles communicate with sensors present on roads, traffic lights, and bridges.
- Manufacturing: Smart factories will be filled with sensors which will monitor different aspects of production.
- Smarter government management and services under “smart cities,” where buildings and other infrastructure and people are all connected so that everyone and everything can move as safely and smoothly as possible
The development of these next-generation 5G communication systems is a complex proposition. It poses challenges for every niche aspect of communication design: speed, traffic, throughput and even device design. A multiscale, multidomain and multiphysics approach with our open ecosystem continues to enable seamless integration of Ansys software in existing platforms for design, development and testing of 5G system.
