Huawei has unveiled new 5G products at a briefing in Beijing ahead of Mobile World Congress next month. This includes a core chip specifically designed for 5G base stations, called Huawei Tiangang, and a 5G modem chip for smartphones. Huawei said it will present its first 5G smartphone using the modem at MWC, with a foldable design.
Huawei said the Tiangang chip will support simplified 5G networks and large-scale 5G network deployments. To date, the company has won 30 commercial 5G contracts and shipped over 25,000 5G base stations globally.
The chip can support large-scale integration of active power amplifiers and passive antenna arrays into very small antennas. It also boasts "super high" computing capacity, Huawei said, with a 2.5-fold increase over previous chips. Using the latest algorithms and beamforming technology, a single chip can control up to 64 channels. This chip also supports 200 MHz blocks of high spectral bandwidth, in preparation for future network deployment with this configuration.
This chip also brings improvements in active antenna units, promising 50 percent smaller, 23 percent lighter and 21 percent less power consuming base stations. Furthermore, the 5G base stations can be deployed in just half the time it took to install a 4G base station, helping reduce site acquisition and network deployment costs, Huawei said.
5G modem
Richard Yu, Huawei Consumer BG CEO, also announced at the event a 5G multi-mode modem chip and commercial devices. The Balong 5000 modem chip can support 5G New Radio standards, both in NSA and SA modes, as well as legacy mobile network standards. In addition, it supports both TDD and FDD spectrum bands, up to 200 MHz and V2X services for connected vehicles.
Yu said the chip offers a much better performance than competitors like Qualcomm's Snapdragon X50 modem, with twice the speeds thanks to the higher spectrum bandwidth. The Balong achieves peak download speeds of 4.6 Gbps on sub-6 GHz bands and 6.5 Gbps on mmWave spectrum. Huawei showed the modem in use in the Huawei 5G CPE Pro, a router also supporting the latest Wi-Fi 6 standard.
Huawei also confirmed that its smartphone shipments exceeded 200 million in 2018, compared to 153 million reported in 2017. Revenues from the consumer division rose around 50 percent to USD 52 billion, driven by demand for more premium devices.
