Technical demonstrations round out two 6G conferences

Most centered on sub-terahertz communications and the technologies needed to make them a reality.

At the 6G Symposium (Washington) and the Brooklyn 6G Summit in October 2022, conference attendees could do more that talk about the mysterious metaverse and about the need for sustainability. Despite the talk of wireless becoming more about experiences than about data rates, engineers will still need to design higher-speed systems to deliver those experiences. The videos below take you through some of the demos.

While all but one video took place at the NYU Brooklyn 6G Summit, there were several demonstrations at the 6G Symposium. The Keysight demonstration appeared at both conferences, as did demonstrations from InterDigital.

With the current focus on sub-terahertz communication, Northeastern University, NYU Tandon School of Engineering, and Keysight Technologies brought their hardware to show. In this first video, Northeastern PhD student Duschia Bodet shows a 2×2 MIMO system operating at 130 GHz. The two transmitters send signals with a 10 GHz bandwidth. Data rate is around 32 Gb/sec.

At the NYU Brooklyn 6G Summit, PhD Student Hitesh Poddar demonstrated NYUSIM: The Open Source 5G and 6G Channel Model Simulator software. The software uses frequency models above 100 GHz to simulate the effects that locations have on signals.

Spectrum sharing has become a hot topic at just about any wireless conference. In the video below, Sudir Pattar of InterDigital explains a concept called “Agile Spectrum Sharing” where users of a frequency must sense other users such as radar and government incumbents and keep cellular beams out of the way.

Keysight Technolgies demonstrated it’s 6G capabilities at both conferences. At the Brooklyn 6G Summit, Abhi Mahadevan provided a demonstration on D-Band Joint Sensing and Communications. The demonstration uses a glass-on-chip system developed at Nokia Bell Labs. It transmits an interleaved OFDM signal used for channel sounding. The system uses two receivers, one for demodulating the transmitted data and one for measuring the signal’s characteristics.

At the two conferences, there was one demonstration of a product for sale. TMYTEK’s Mark Yu showed attendees an educational beamforming kit. A 28 GHz transmitter sends a sine wave through a beamformer to a receive antenna that conditions the signal. From there, the signal is digitized and sent to a PC over a USB link. Students can use the kit to learn how beamforming works. To learn more about TMYTEK’s BBox beamformer, see BBox: Beam steering for mmWave testing, a video interview with TMYTEK’s Ethan Lin who explains how the BBox works.