A new generation of 6G technology could enable extended reality (XR) and high fidelity mobile holograms according to Samsung Electronics.
The claims came as Samsung demonstrated developments in 6G technology at a communications conference this week.
Samsung Research and Samsung Research America joined forces with the University of California, Santa Barbara (USCB) to stage the demo at the IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC 2021), held June 14 to June 18, 2021.
The presentation focused on the potential impact that THz could have on next-generation 6G technology, demonstrating an end-to-end 140GHz wireless link using a fully digital beamforming solution.
Sunghyun Choi, senior vice president at Samsung, is an IEEE fellow and head of the Advanced Communication Research Center at Samsung Research. He said: “As we shared in our 6G vision white paper last year, we believe new spectrum opportunities at the THz spectrum will become a driving force of 6G technology. This demonstration can be a major milestone in exploring the feasibility of using the THz spectrum for 6G wireless communications.”
The THz band includes an enormous amount of available spectrum, which will enable wideband channels with tens of GHz-wide bandwidth. This could potentially provide a means to meet the 6G requirement of terabits per second data rate. The peak data rate can be 50 times faster than 5G and the over-the-air latency could potentially be reduced to one-tenth.
The end-to-end prototype system the researchers demonstrated consists of a 16-channel phased array transmitter and receiver modules, driven by CMOS (Complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor) RFICs (Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits), and a baseband unit to process signals with 2GHz bandwidth and fast adaptive beamforming. In the over-the-air test, the prototype system achieved real-time throughput of 6.2 Gbps over a 15-metre distance with adaptive beam steering capability at the Terahertz frequency.
Photo shows Samsung researchers: Wonsuk Choi, Shadi Abu-Surra and Gary Xu with the THz proof-of-concept system