Samsung announces its completed RF technology based on 8nm process to increase 5G efficiency

Samsung is not only widely known for its Smartphones and Galaxy books, but its also a global leader in advanced semiconductor technology. And today, the company made a huge declaration when it announced its newest radio frequency (RF) technology based on the 8-nanometer (nm) process.

The company promised to offer a ‘one chip solution,’ specifically for 5G communications with support for multi-channel and multi-antenna chip designs. Samsung’s 8nm RF platform will give the company leadership in the 5G semiconductor market from sub-6GHz to mmWave applications.

 From what we know, Samsung’s 8nm RF process technology is a part of the RF-related solutions portfolio which includes 28nm- and 14nm-based RF.  

“Through excellence in innovation and process manufacturing, we’ve reinforced our next-generation wireless communication offerings. As 5G mmWave expands, Samsung’s 8nm RF will be a great solution for customers looking for long battery life and excellent signal quality on compact mobile devices.”

Going more into the inner workings of the technology, it was revealed that the company increased the scaling to advanced nodes and improving the digital circuits significantly in performance, power consumption, and area (PPA).

However, earlier RF blocks were stopped from this improvement due to degenerative parasites like increased resistance from narrow line width. And due to that most communications chips tend to see degraded RF characteristics. All this result in deteriorated amplification performance of reception frequency while also increasing increased power consumption.

But what Samsung has done is that they developed a unique architecture exclusive to 8nm RF named RFextremeFET (RFeFET™) that can significantly improve RF characteristics while using less power. The RFeFET™ supplements the digital PPA scaling and restores the analog/RF scaling at the same time, and thus achieving high-performance 5G platforms.

 Reports indicate that this process leads to maximize channel mobility and minimizes parasites. Another advantage of RFeFET™ is that with the increased performance the total number of transistors of RF chips and the area of analog/RF blocks can be reduced.

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