CEA, a French R&D company, and Spectronite, a leading innovator in wireless backhaul technology, have announced that they have adapted and optimized CEA-Leti's spectrally efficient waveform with enhanced spectral efficiency for Spectronite's X-Series modem for 5G systems.
CEA-Leti is a technology research institute at CEA that pioneers micro-and nanotechnologies, including radiofrequency technologies. Spectronite offers a unique software-defined technology for wireless backhaul that allows for the longest and highest-capacity microwave links ever designed. X-Series, its latest product line, achieves a capacity of up to 10Gb/s and can reach multi-gigabit transfers over distances up to 50 kilometers.
With this jointly developed radio technology, Spectronite's goal is to disrupt the way operators interconnect 5G base stations. In the 5G rollout, operators are required to deploy an increasing number of base stations, each of them supporting a data rate multiplied by 10 compared to 4G base stations to address user expectations in a context of mobile-data usage doubling every 18 months. Backhaul links rely on either optical fiber or wireless communication.
E-band radios in the 80 GHz frequency band can provide the required capacity for 5G backhaul over short distances in wireless applications, typically up to 5 km. For longer distances, traditional radio architectures in the frequency range from 6 GHz to 42 GHz are limited by design in scaling. Spectronite's software radio architecture overcomes this limitation by enabling intra-band, non-contiguous carrier aggregation up to 10 Gb/s in these bands.
CEA-Leti's patented optimization used in the collaboration aims at providing a significantly higher spectral efficiency compared to traditional radios while respecting spectrum emission masks imposed by ETSI standards. The collaboration's initial results show a data-rate increase of 20 percent compared to the conventional backhaul radio waveform. The increase in spectral efficiency provides throughput equivalent to a transmission with 8192QAM modulation, while the radio operates at 2048 QAM modulation. CEA-Leti and Spectronite are now working on the technology transfer with an X-Series product targeted for Q4 2022.
"Our collaboration with Spectronite strategically leverages CEA-Leti's Systems Division's deep expertise in wireless communications for an application that can keep up with the continuous spiking of global mobile data usage," said Sébastien Dauvé, CEA-Leti's CEO. "This success underscores the flexibility of our technologies to meet the challenges of innovative startups, SMEs, and large industrial companies."
"While our software-defined microwave products allow mobile operators to roll-out 5G networks faster and at a lower cost compared to fiber connectivity, our collaboration with CEA-Leti takes us an order of magnitude further, by reaching the highest level of spectral efficiency ever achieved in this industry," said Jean-Philippe Fournier, Spectronite CEO. "With this unprecedented level of spectral efficiency, we provide huge savings to our customers on the cost of their spectrum rental licenses."
Click here to learn more about Spectronite's X-series modems.
