Qualcomm has announced a number of achievements and updates in its work developing 5G NR technologies. First and foremost, the company revealed the second wave of QTM052 mmWave antenna modules with 5G NR specifically for smartphones and other mobile devices. Qualcomm says this new family of antennas is 25% smaller than those announced earlier this year, which will help phone makers fit them into smaller form factors. The reduced-size also gives phone makers more freedom in antenna placement and flexibility when designing their 5G NR devices. The antennas are paired with Qualcomm's Snapdragon X50 5G modem and can fully handle mmWave technologies, such as beam forming, beam steering, and beam tracking. Last, the QTM052 includes a 5G NR radio transceiver, power management IC, RF front-end, and phased antenna array. It can utilize up to 800 MHz of spectrum in various mmWave bands. Qualcomm says this antenna / modem combo will appear in devices in early 2019. In other 5G news, Qualcomm has together with partner Ericsson successfully completed an over-the-air call in sub-6 GHz bands using 3GPP Rel-15 compliant 5G NR in a smartphone phone factor test device. The test was completed in Ericsson's Stockholm lab using 3.5 GHz spectrum. This successful test joins similar ones made using mmWave 5G NR in the 28 GHz and 39 GHz bands. All the tests relied on Ericsson’s 5G NR radio AIR 6488 and baseband products together with Qualcomm's Snapdragon X50 5G modem and RF subsystem. Last, Qualcomm announced that it is working together with Samsung to develop 5G small cells, a vital part of the way 5G networks will be deployed. Small cells will be a building block for 5G with the goal of network densification. The companies plan to pair Qualcomm's FSM 100xx 10nm 5G tech with Samsung's 5G Small Cell form using both sub-6 GHz and mmWave spectrum. The combo will offer MIMO baseband functionality with multi-gigabit throughput speeds in a compact form able to support indoor and outdoor deployments. Qualcomm and Samsung expect to begin sampling this jointly-developed small cell in 2020.


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