Is 5G Here? Qorvo Highlights from MWC19

It should come as no surprise that the pending arrival of 5G was THE big story from Mobile World Congress 2019 in Barcelona. Qorvo’s Brent Dietz covered his top five takeaways from MWC19, including foldable phones and Sophia the robot — but here’s a recap of Qorvo’s highlights from the show.
 

Qorvo’s 5G mobile portfolio enters high-volume production

Most people in the industry didn’t think 5G would be a reality before 2020, but one overriding message from Barcelona is that 5G is coming faster than anyone actually expected — and we could see 5G handsets in the second half of 2019.

In support of that transition, we announced at MWC 2019 that our portfolio of mobile 5G products has moved into high-volume production, helping leading smartphone manufacturers accelerate the rollout of 5G around the world. Featured products include the highly integrated front-end modules (FEMs) shown below, which support all major baseband chipsets and incorporate all the RF front-end (RFFE) functions required to support new and “refarmed” 5G bands targeted in early deployments.

 
Read our announcement >
 

Enabling 5G wireless infrastructure with 100+ million shipped RF devices

5G handsets won’t work unless cellular infrastructure is set up to support 5G. Not only have Qorvo infrastructure products been used in dozens of 5G field trials, including the Samsung 5G multiple-input/multiple-output (MIMO) demo at the 2018 Winter Olympics, but we also announced at MWC19 that we’ve shipped more than 100 million 5G wireless infrastructure components since January 2018.

Our 5G infrastructure portfolio includes solutions for both the receive and transmit RF front end, enabling customers to use beamforming with massive MIMO base stations to achieve higher data capacity, wider coverage, and indoor penetration using sub-6 GHz and millimeter wave frequencies.

We were also featured in MWC press announcements from silicon-on-insulator (SOI) partner GlobalFoundries and 5G GaN partner Gapwaves. Gapwaves’ 28 GHz 5G active antenna features a Qorvo integrated FEM and our GaN-on-SiC technology.

Read our 5G infrastructure news >
 

Integration will be critical for 5G handsets

Honored for helping to drive the global adoption of 5G

Among the many highlights during MWC, Qorvo’s Paul Cooper was recognized by the Global TD-LTE Initiative (GTI) as a 2019 Honorary Award recipient at its GTI Night celebration.

Paul, who is the director of carrier liaison and standards at Qorvo, has worked for several years to further the cause of the GTI 2.0 mission to establish a 5G RF front-end sub-6 GHz ecosystem, supporting member carriers in the U.S., China and Europe. The Qorvo Carrier Program team coordinated test and marketing staff to provide data in support of 3GPP New Radio (NR) standards that will drive global adoption of 5G. This award was the culmination of the hard work put in by Qorvo’s 3GPP RAN4 standards team and engineering teams providing lab test data.

We’re proud to be among a team of experts from multiple companies, including Qorvo, Skyworks, Sprint, Qualcomm and LG, that are helping our customers’ customers — the wireless carriers — address the RF challenges of 5G.

Qorvo’s Paul Cooper and a cross-company collaborative team accept a GTI Honorary Award at MWC19