Samsung announced today that the company has launched the latest radio frequency technology based on the 8-nanometer process.

Samsung said that this advanced process technology is expected to provide a “single-chip solution” for 5G communications specifically designed to support multi-channel and multi-antenna chip designs. Samsung’s 8-nanometer RF platform will extend the company’s leadership in the 5G semiconductor market from the Sub-6GHz frequency band to millimeter wave applications.

Samsung’s 8nm RF process technology is the latest addition to the currently widely used RF-related solutions including 28nm and 14nm. Since 2017, Samsung has shipped more than 500 million mobile terminal radio frequency chips for high-end smartphones.

“Through superior innovation and process manufacturing, we have strengthened our next-generation wireless communication products.” said Hyung Jin Lee, director of Samsung Electronics’ foundry technology development team. “With the expansion of 5G millimeter waves, Samsung’s 8nm radio frequency will become a good solution for those customers seeking to achieve longer battery life and excellent signal quality on compact mobile terminals.”

With the continuous expansion to advanced nodes, digital circuits have been significantly improved in terms of performance, power consumption and area(PPA), while analog/RF modules have not achieved this due to degraded parasitic effects (such as increased resistance due to narrow line widths). Therefore, most communication chips tend to experience degradation of radio frequency characteristics, such as degradation of receiving frequency amplification performance and increased power consumption.

In order to overcome the challenges of analog/RF expansion, Samsung has developed a unique 8-nanometer RF dedicated architecture called RFeFET, which can significantly improve RF characteristics while reducing power consumption. Compared with 14nm radio frequency, Samsung’s RFeFET supplements the digital PPA expansion while restoring the analog/radio frequency expansion, thus realizing a high-performance 5G platform.

Samsung wrote in the press release that Samsung’s process optimization maximizes channel mobility while minimizing parasitic effects. As the performance of the RFeFET is greatly improved, the total number of transistors in the RF chip and the area of the analog/RF block can be reduced.  Compared with 14-nanometer RF, Samsung’s 8-nanometer RF process technology has increased power efficiency by 35% due to the use of RFeFET architecture innovation, while RF chip area has been reduced by 35%.