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Can you hear me now (with 5G)?

Remember the guy from the Verizon commercial “Can you hear me now”? The guy travels over and over many different locations across the U.S to check the cell coverage showing superiority of Verizon’s network coverage. Today, 5G can bring much relief to him, low bands of 5G can travel over hundreds of square miles and can pass through more obstacles, both indoors and out, providing better coverage and a stronger signal.

The baseband processing and radio frequency chips for the base stations behind new 5G networks require fast RF sampling using high speed ADCs. “RF sampling” is the technology of digitizing an RF signal with an ADC directly, without an analog frequency conversion to a lower IF (intermediate frequency) or baseband (Zero IF) before the signal is converted from analog to digital. [1]

5G is driving new wave of semiconductor chips

Sending RF signals directly to the ADC for conversion hasn’t been possible until recently. With advancement in process technology and design architectures, ADC sampling rates have increased to accommodate the higher RF frequencies. Direct RF sampling greatly simplifies the design and minimizes cost and complexity of base station receivers.

However, the design of these high sampling ADC is complex as the sampling rate must be at least twice the bandwidth of the signal being digitized. Our customers are designing and successfully verifying these ADCs with Siemens EDA Symphony mixed signal verification platform.

One example is from EESY-IC, a company based in Erlangen Germany, who used Symphony to verify their high-speed ADC which was designed for subsampling of RF signals for software-defined radio applications. Read the whitepaper here

Sumit Vishwakarma

Sumit Vishwakarma has over 15 years of experience in the EDA industry including 10 years in AMS and 5 years in digital verification. At Mentor, Sumit is responsible for product management and marketing functions across Mentor’s AMS verification product portfolio driving circuit simulation, mixed-signal, and library characterization platform. Over the years, Sumit has held various roles ranging from design engineer, application engineer and verification specialist at Intel, Springsoft and Synopsys. Before joining Mentor, Sumit was responsible to drive the sales and development of Analog/Mixed-Signal simulators and verification and debug platforms at Synopsys. He has published papers in IEEE, DesingCon, DAC, SNUG, U2U, and multiple tech articles and blogs on mixed-signal verification methodologies. Sumit has an MS in Electrical engineering from Arizona State and Management Science & Engineering PD from Stanford. He is a vivid digital artist and loves teaching art to kids.

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This article first appeared on the Siemens Digital Industries Software blog at https://blogs.stage.sw.siemens.com/cicv/2021/06/21/can-you-hear-me-now-with-5g/