Qualcomm announced its first LTE Advanced Pro modem, the X16 LTE, last February, supporting downlink speeds of up to 1.0 Gbps…
Qualcomm announced its first LTE Advanced Pro modem, the X16 LTE, last February, supporting downlink speeds of up to 1.0 Gbps. Today the company announced its second-generation gigabit class LTE modem, the Snapdragon X20 LTE, along with some new RF front-end components.
The Snapdragon X20 LTE modem will use Samsung’s latest 10nm LPE process and offer a few key enhancements over the X16 LTE modem integrated into the Snapdragon 835 SoC. First, the X20 gains support for 5x carrier aggregation (5x20MHz), allowing for more flexible use of available licensed and unlicensed spectrum with over 1000 possible carrier aggregation band combinations. It also increases the number of usable spatial streams from 10 to 12 by performing 4×4 MIMO on three aggregated carriers. These improvements allow the X20 to support UE Category 18 on the downlink, boosting peak theoretical bandwidth to 1.2 Gbps, a 20% improvement over the X16 LTE modem. Uplink bandwidth remains the same, however, supporting up to 150 Mbps with 2x20MHz carrier aggregation and 64-QAM.
Improving performance was not Qualcomm’s primary goal for X20, though; by supporting 5x carrier aggregation (CA) and Licensed Assisted Access (LAA), an LTE Advanced Pro feature that allows CA of licensed and unlicensed spectrum (5 GHz) on the downlink, the X20 allows network operators to deploy gigabit LTE service with only 10MHz of licensed spectrum. This is vitally important in many crowded markets where 20MHz blocks are rare. According to a Strategy Analytics study, 64% of network operators around the globe can deploy gigabit LTE using 20MHz CA and LAA, the configuration offered by the Snapdragon X16 LTE modem. This number increases to 90% when using 10MHz CA and LAA, making gigabit LTE a viable bridge to 5G.
