Taiwanese semiconductor company- MediaTek Inc. has recently unveiled a 5G modem with mmWave support. The Helio M80 has been developed after introducing the Helio M70 modem in 2020 and the new product is a direct competitor to American company- Qualcomm’s X60 modem.
Notably, the Helio M70 was the first modem developed by the company, however, it lacked the ability to support mmWave bands. The M80 has been developed to address the challenges of its predecessor as it integrates both sub-6GHz and mmWave on a single chip.
Elaborating further on the above, the M80 modem exists alongside other components like GPU, ISP, and CPU on the same die. The new product supports both standalone as well as non-standalone 5G modes carrying a maximum theoretical download and upload speed of 7.67Gbps and 3.67Gbps respectively.
When comparing to MediaTek M80 with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X60, the latter is capable of witnessing a download speed of 7.5Gbps and an upload speed of 3Gbps, while Exynos 2100 by Samsung can showcase 7.35Gbps download speed and 3.67Gbps in the uplink.
Seemingly, along with supporting the mmWave networks, the M80 also supplements 5G SIM, dual 5G SA and NSA mobile networks, along with dual Voice over New Radio.
For the record, other beneficial features of MediaTek’s M80 model includes carrier aggregation across sub-6GHz 5G and mmWave bands and the support for Dynamic Spectrum Sharing. Dynamic Spectrum Sharing or DSS is a technology that permits the carriers to use 5G NR and 4G LTE simultaneously on the same network band without the need to reserve a chunk of spectrum for 4G or 5G.
In addition to the above, the new M80 modem comes with an UltraSave Network Environment Detection and UltraSave Content Awareness technologies that can automatically adjust the power and operating frequencies based on the network connections.
Citing sources, the MediaTek M80 will be available in the market in the second half of 2021. Additionally, details regarding which SoC the new 5G modem will debut remains unknown at the moment.
Source Credit: https://www.xda-developers.com/mediatek-m80-5g-modem-mmwave/