A UK company has developed a technology it believes can create better RF front ends for 6G to handle the growing needs of data intensive applications such as AI, virtual reality, augmented reality and IoT.

Nanusens believes its MEMS-within-CMOS technology can help meet the huge potential of the 6G market that will be measured in the hundreds of millions of new devices a year.

“This builds on and extends the company’s work of using its unique technology to enable the upper 5G bands to be used cost effectively,” said Josep Montanyà, Nanusens’ CEO. “We have test chips for this with customers and they are impressed with their performance and actually advised us to use this technology for 6G as the industry really has a challenge.”

He said the issue was that 6G needed to handle many more and possibly higher frequencies than 5G. To do this requires additional antennas to be integrated into the phone to handle more bands but, due to them having to be smaller to fit more of them inside the phone, their efficiency decreases.

“To get the best possible performance from each antenna, each needs to be tuned to reconfigure to different bands and to avoid mismatch with the power amplifier,” said Montanyà. “This is currently done by means of tuneable capacitors.”

The company has used its patented, silicon-proven technology of building MEMS structures using standard CMOS technologies to create numerous, digitally tuneable, nanoscale capacitors within the CMOS layers of a chip along with the control circuitry at the same time. This single chip is smaller than other options and provides better performance due its improved linearity, which means there is virtually zero distortion. In addition, as the nano-capacitors are more power efficient, talk times are up to 30% better, thus solving the problem of decreased efficiency.

These RF digitally tuneable capacitors (DTCs) also solve the problem of antennas becoming increasingly power hungry in the higher frequency bands.

The practical result is an increase in range by around 14% or more, which improves user experience as there are fewer dropped calls or poor reception areas.

Marc Llamas, Nanusens’ CTO, said this was not only for phones but also for other applications in industry and automotive due to its much lower latencies and data rates that are 50 times better than 5G at 1000Gbit/s.

“That is a huge potential 6G market that is measured in the hundreds of millions of new devices a year. driven by the rapidly growing needs of data intensive applications such as AI, virtual reality, augmented reality and IoT,” said Llamas. “Our unique technology of just using standard CMOS techniques in any CMOS fab means that we can produce in virtually unlimited volumes to meet this demand.”

Nanusens’ technology uses an array of RF capacitive switches and opens up the implementation of antenna tuning for the higher 6G bands. The DTCs have passed over four billion switching cycles in the lab without degradation. They are also very robust having been tested for shock, vibration and thermal cycling.

Being built using standard CMOS means the DTCs can be made at the same time and on the same chip as other RF front end components, such as PA, LNA and transceivers, to reduce interconnect parasitics while making them reconfigurable. These single chips will fit in small, low-profile, low-cost packages and this integration also reduces the BoM and saves board area compared with multi-component options.

Manufacturing in a standard CMOS fab enables Nanusens devices to benefit from the CMOS economies of scale and thus cost less than using more expensive silicon-on-insulator or silicon-on-sapphire processes, or specific MEMS fabs. Nanusens also enjoys the high yields of CMOS fabs for this product, virtually unlimited production volumes, and the ability to use any CMOS fab. Product production times are those of typical CMOS products.

Founded in 2014 by Josep Montanyà and Marc Llamas, Nanusens (www.nanusens.com) is headquartered in Paignton, Devon, England, with research and development offices in Barcelona, Spain, and Shenzen, China.