Friday 19 March 2021

KMW's C-band 64TRx 640W 25kg Massive MIMO


There is a Massive MIMO weight wars taking place. Last month, Ericsson announced that it had a 64T64R Massive MIMO antenna radio unit that weighs just 20kg. Two days later, Huawei announced at MWC Shanghai that its latest equivalent tips the scales at only 19kg. The Mobile Network covered it nicely here and so did Light Reading here.

While Huawei & Ericsson are number 1 and 2 players in the world, at a far smaller scale is KMW (Korea Micro Wave). In conjunction with RCR Wireless, they announced a C-band 64TRx 640W 25kg mMIMO Hardware Ready along with a whitepaper and a video. 

The whitepaper can be downloaded from here and the summary says:

Massive MIMO technology has been deployed for capacity improvement as the 5G NR system. However, in the aspect of coverage expansion, there has been no satisfactory solution so far.

KMW applies the Modular Architecture technology to develop the mMIMO RU (64TRx, 640W, 25kg) with the natural convection cooling system as a solution of 5G coverage expansion.

This Modular Architecture, AFAM (Antenna, Filter and Power Amplifier Module), introduces Radio’s heat source separation that maximizes heat dissipation performance and minimizes the size and weight. And it allows operators to provide the desired smartest service at a lower investment.

Modular RU can also be a standardized platform with easy frequency variation just in time. Moreover, if the market requests O-RAN RU, the product shall be provided on time with the set of HW/SW.

KMW is a professional RU H/W company delivering 5G mMIMO RU to Global Market collaboration through S/W JDM with Global OEM. KMW is ready to cooperate with the global partners and customers.

It would be nice to see some of these massive MIMO units deployed in Open RAN networks later this year. 

Last year Vodafone had announced a bevy or Open RAN radio vendors. Hopefully we will see some more massive MIMO units from others. 

Finally, it should be noted that KMW also goes by the name GigaTera, which is what was earlier known in the US as KMW Inc. Details here.

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