Heat Death 5G

If you begin to understand wireless technologies, or generally any modern technologies, then sooner or later you will come across the topic of 5G. The whole world is filled with talk about 5G networks and all sorts of incredible new products that they will release. They say it will be a completely new Internet.



At Digits To Dollars, we consider ourselves electronics-savvy practitioners. Therefore, we are a little surprised by all this discussion of 5G technology. Yes, it is coming, and the data transfer rate will increase, but the mobile industry still has to roll mountains. We could pamper you with a lot of shocking stories about roaming and forwarding, or scold traffic problems arising from the increase in the number of cell towers. But, perhaps, it will be much easier for you to understand another obstacle to the commissioning of 5G - it's warm.



5G phones get warm. Repent. They will probably even be able to ignite the battery - but at least it’s definitely going to burn if you put the phone in your pants pocket. At the Mobile World Congress in February, we spoke with a Sony engineer; he demonstrated a telephone standing behind the glass, reaching speeds of 1 Gb / s. This is speed! We asked the engineer why not accelerate it even more, and he replied: "It is overheating." A good, clear answer, from the practice of a soldering iron, microcircuits and antennas. We are ready to argue for anything that at the exhibition next year no one will speak so openly about this problem.



Major improvements in data transfer speeds in 5G will appear only with the transition to the millimeter range (mmWave). This is a completely new frequency band that allows you to raise speeds to really high (let us leave aside all the problems with increasing the number of cell towers per unit area). The problem is that millimeter radios generate a lot of heat. If it’s very rough to simplify, then the millimeter frequencies are close to the microwave ones - to the very ones that warm up our dinners.



From recent conversations with industry representatives, we know that the mobile transmitter industry uses a time-tested method to solve this problem - to ignore it in the hope that it will disappear. This whole problem reminds us of cases when middle managers really do not want to raise these issues with top managers who are so crowded under the 5G flag. “Ummm, boss, your pants are on fire, literally.”



There are other factors. We will not load you with theories of conspiracy theories about the Deep State , however, today in this supply chain there are clearly no links.



There are, of course, some solutions, but all of them are not complete, and all have serious flaws. It turns out that over the past 40 years we have not improved the way we cool electronics. There are only two methods for cooling - fans and heat dissipation.



Fans are exactly what you thought. Anyone who has opened the desktop or overclocked a laptop knows what they look like. However, they have two problems - they are large and consist of moving parts. And both of these problems contradict the design decisions that have been applied to mobile technologies in the past 15 years.



Thermal dissipation is simply the transfer of heat to accelerate air cooling. On a PC, this is achieved using fun, bristly gizmos attached to processors. These things will not fit into the phone with a thickness of 10 mm. Therefore, chip makers are exploring the possibility of using "straws", copper tubes that extend along the entire length of the phone. They take up a lot of space, and inserting a large conductor (copper!) Into the phone disrupts the operation of mobile radio transmitters (which harms the data transfer speeds).



Before we can fully enjoy Their Majesty 5G, the industry will need to find a solution to this problem. And it seems that this means the need to start searching for a completely new approach to the problem.