New 5G Enabler: mmWave Phased Array Active Antenna Innovator Kits

This blog post was first published by Anokiwave, which joined the Qorvo family in March 2024. Anokiwave is a leading supplier of high-performance silicon integrated circuits (ICs) for intelligent, active array antennas for D&A, SATCOM and 5G applications.

Anokiwave is a fabless semiconductor IC company whose goal is to provide ICs that make mmWave Active Antennas a commercial reality. Our IC technologies have been used to enable mmWave 5G radio systems since 2016 and are the underpinnings of a large portion of deployed 5G networks today. Since then, each year, Anokiwave has released new generations of silicon ICs in all mmWave 5G bands, all of which are in volume production and used by the industry’s leading players in fielded radios.

Anokiwave’s ICs enable the industry’s best performing, smallest form factor, lowest cost and lowest DC power mmWave 5G radios. To further accelerate mmWave 5G market growth, Anokiwave is introducing scalable mmWave active antenna solutions called Active Antenna Innovator Kits.

The power of the Antenna Innovator Kits is seeing the superior performance of Anokiwave ICs at the array level. The kits are complete antenna front ends going from mmWave to IF and can be easily used to prototype or to perform a proof of concept for a 5G radio or antenna design. The design is easily scaled up or down in power to the specific requirement you may have. Anokiwave’s goal is to provide the market with a tool that they may use and adapt to learn more about active antennas, to become familiar with active antenna technology and most importantly to accelerate their products to market quickly.

The kit contains a phased array board, a heat sink, a DC converter card and a control interface card that connects to the array board. It is designed to be adopted by our customers and can migrate very rapidly into a production environment. It has all of the I/O capabilities such that our customers can build 5G products very quickly based on this kit. Users can modify the DC power supply to provide different input voltages to power the array board; they can modify the input control signals with a simple modification of the card to support virtually any type of interface into the array board.

The PCB is designed on a commercial process and is key to unleashing the singular performance of the Anokiwave ICs in a commercial ecosystem. It is designed to transition rapidly into a production environment. When we hired our team, we looked for people with mmWave phased array design experience AND with commercial experience. When we were designing the array, the team had in mind how this was going to be commercially built – which is critical in delivering low-cost arrays into the 5G ecosystem.

Our experience with this product is – we literally had it out of the box; we implemented some features, took data and saw very close performance to ideal for meeting the system requirements. We are well above our target spec – meeting our linear EIRP target with margin, and our patterns look close to ideal across frequency. Anokiwave’s patented ZERO-CAL® enables us to compensate for any electronic amplitude and phase mismatch across the array, allowing us to generate ideal patterns out of the box with the ZERO-CAL® feature and realize nearly ideal performance.

We expect more and more customers – especially ones who are newer to the mmWave 5G game – to adopt starting platforms like this and quickly start delivering solutions to the market in high volume. Anokiwave’s goal is to enable radio manufacturers and antenna manufacturers to successfully build active antennas in a more quickly and cost-effective way at a mass scale. Going forward, we see the future to be very bright; we see 5G to be a very exciting space; we see our ICs as the most powerful in the market, and these arrays are a testament to the performance we can achieve with our ICs.

Anokiwave continues to lay a path for the industry to adopt mmWave active antennas at a commercial scale and make mmWave 5G a reality for all. Please contact us to talk about your 5G needs.

Learn more about the Active Antenna Innovator Kits.

Watch the recent interview by Microwave Journal discussing the Innovator Kits.