This white paper provides a detailed analysis of the design implications of a 5G radio for the C-band in a co-location deployment. An example design using off-the-shelf components is presented to show that the additional 3GPP co-location requirements are easily met when designing the receiver with highly integrated and cost-effective RF sampling SoC devices such as the Zynq UltraScale+ RFSoC DFE. It is shown that the requirements on the antenna filter are not dependent on the choice of ADC/receiver architecture and there are no additional requirements for the antenna filtering specification.
In fact, widely available low-cost miniature ceramic bandpass filters provide enough rejection that can meet the co-location requirement with ample margin. This white paper also discusses the advantages of using RF sampling converters for 5G transceiver design from the perspective of frequency planning flexibility and overcoming some of the inherent drawbacks of the ZIF architecture. The Zynq UltraScale+ RFSoC DFE provides radio architects a highly integrated system on-chip solution that can be adapted for many use cases and deployment needs for the 5G network that also meet and exceed the 3GPP RF performance requirements.
For more information, see the Breakthrough Adaptive Radio Platform for Mass 5G Deployments website.