Shahriar Discusses 5G

Welcome back, Shahriar Shahramian from The Signal Path!

• Shahriar has been a guest on the show twice before
  • Episode 228
  • We posted the audio from Dave's in-person interview with Shahriar
• Bell Labs bought by Nokia
• Shahriar works at the Murray Hill campus
• He is the head of the mmwave ASIC research group
• Research group only has 8 people
• Have multiple designs happening at once
• Task switching between optical and RF chips
• Software stuff at Bell Labs research is wide ranging
• Moore's law for RF
• Going beyond the Marconi era: Doing phased array transmissions
• Cramming more bits per hertz
• Going from 4G to 5G requires going to higher frequencies
• Transmitting GHz frequencies in all directions would blow the link budget
• Would require Phased Arrays in order to transmit only power to reach individual devices
• 256 transmitter and 128 receiver antennas in order to beamform
• Beamforming in 5G will require line of sight
• At 90 GHz (5G frequencies), the signal would not be able to pass through modern windows (because of the coating on the glass)
• 5G will solve the latency issues that plagues 4G LTE
• Link margin is how much above the absolute noise of the system are you
• Types of modulation
  • OFDM
  • QAM constellations
• Encoding based on the momentum of the polarization of the signal
• Common mode modulation creating phantom channels
• "The Fact That It Works Is Absolute Magic"
• Bose Einstein Condensate Experiment
• The dynamic range of peoples' perspectives
• "If you don't teach people how to sort through information during the information age, then you have no idea how the world is going to turn out"
• How to initiate a phased array connection
• Why do you need so many antenna elements in receive mode?
• Active denial system tested by the military
• Shahriar bought a SiBEAM (now "Silicon Image") 60 GHz phased array system that creates a wireless HDMI link off of eBay