Making 5G a reality

What is the addressable market in India for R&S?
Rohde & Schwarz India (RSINDIA) is one of the leaders in the Indian test and measurement (T&M) market. We achieved approximately 15 percent growth last year in India. We have been a trusted T&M solution partner for more than two decades in India; we partner closely with various agencies, training institutes and technology companies to facilitate technology growth in the country. For example, we have cooperation with Bharat Electronics Limited (BEL) for radio solution.

We are one of the leading suppliers for the Indian mobile and wireless communications sector, offering a complete portfolio of T&M instruments and systems for the development, production, and type testing of components and consumer devices as well as for setting up and monitoring mobile networks. Beside these segments, RSINDIA supplies T&M products and solutions for automotive, aerospace and defense, industrial electronics, research, and education sectors. Quite a few examples of our success stories can be described as we have more than 50 percent market share in electromagnetic interference/electromagnetic compatibility (EMI/EMC) testing in India.

Recently, RSINDIA was named Indian T&M Company of the Year at Frost & Sullivan’s 2018 India Best Practices Awards Banquet in Mumbai. The award is the acknowledgment of R&S gaining a sizeable market share in the past 5 years and becoming a powerful brand in the T&M space.

How do you plan to maximize your share? Please outline your strategy for the next 1 year?
In India, we offer complete support, calibration, repairing, maintenance as well as turnkey project execution with local value addition. We have a central calibration lab in Bengaluru. About 4 years ago we started R&D activity in India with a project given by one of our chipset customers, today we are also supporting our parent organization in Germany with this R&D facility. Already a large number of developers are working in our R&D operations at Delhi and Bangalore.

What are the key trends in the telecom T&M market in India?
The Indian telecom industry has witnessed unprecedented growth from the past few years due to continuous deployment of next-generation technologies, increasing subscriber base, and unprecedented data traffic. T&M equipment plays critical role for the telecom sector ecosystem partners including network equipment manufacturers (NEMS), mobile device manufacturers, and telecommunication service providers. A major driving factor for the growth of the telecom test equipment market is the introduction of new technologies and standards within the telecom industry.

The demand for test equipment is enhancing due to growing bandwidth demands and introduction of next generation cellular and wireless technologies. Further, increasing R&D spending in the telecom sector along with growth in the mobile phone market is expected to drive the market growth.

Moreover, regulatory compliance, government support, and constant technology developments are expected to boost the telecom testing equipment market in 2019. Considering the announcement of Department of Telecommunications (DoT) for rolling out a mandatory plan to initially test devices from April 1, 2019, the Indian telecom equipment testing market is expected to see huge demand for the test equipment and services, which are relevant to essential requirements for safety, EMI, electromagnetic compatibility EMC, radio frequency (RF), specific absorption rate (SAR), and other technical requirements.

There is a lot of hype regarding demand created by 5G. How does R&S plan to leverage it?
Two key features in 5G NR are especially important for the realization of higher data rates than in LTE: the use of millimeter wave frequencies (up to 100 GHz) and support for significantly higher signal bandwidths. In particular, 5G NR supports signal bandwidths up to 100 MHz for carrier frequencies below 6 GHz and up to 400 MHz for frequencies in the millimeter wave range.

These ambitious features bring new challenges for development engineers. Designing power amplifiers that exhibit the necessary characteristics (e.g. linearity) is not trivial and may necessitate new design approaches (e.g. digital predistortion). The circuit is needed to generate frequencies in the millimeter wave range requires careful design and selection of components in order to reduce the effects of phase noise introduced by mixers and multipliers. Beamforming also requires very good amplitude and phase synchronization between antenna elements in active antenna systems.

The high frequencies intensify the challenges for T&M methods. The short wavelengths and higher losses in circuits necessitate tight integration, making it impractical to supply connector ports for testing. At the same time, the effects of connectors and test fixtures become non- negligible, potentially affecting the validity of conducted measurements.

Continuously updated T&M equipment from Rohde & Schwarz helps the industry quickly bring 5G NR solutions to market. Developers, for example, urgently need suitable signal sources and analyzers. We offer new software for 5G NR signal generation and analysis. It simplifies generation of uplink and downlink 5G NR signals for all testing needs.

A signal generator for 5G NR needs to be able to generate extremely clean wideband signals with excellent EVM over a wide frequency range. This requires the signal generator to exhibit outstanding spectral, phase, and amplitude characteristics. To overcome high path loss at millimeter wave frequencies, very high RF output power is also necessary. The R&S SMW200A vector signal generator fulfils all these and other requirements resulting from 3GPP Releases.

With 5G NR, signal analysis bandwidths of at least 1 GHz become necessary in order to capture the interaction of multiple component carriers. The R&S FSW-B1200 option provides 1200 MHz of internal analysis bandwidth for the 43 GHz and 50 GHz models of the R&S FSW series of signal and spectrum analyzers.