Pharrowtech was set up in 2018 as a spin-out from imec, the research and innovation hub in nanoelectronics and digital technologies, based in Leuven in Belgium.
The company has extensive experience of the telecommunications and semiconductor industries and technical expertise across chip, antenna and algorithm development and design.
Six years on and Pharrowtech is viewed as being at the forefront of developing mmWave technology and has chalked up several significant partnerships and successful funding rounds in that time.
“The development of mmWave technology and ensuring that we can scale production of our solutions to tens of millions of parts has meant that we have focused on developing mmWave circuitry in CMOS,” explained Wim Van Thillo, the company’s CEO and co-founder. “We started working on this technology back in 2005 while we were conducting research at imec and, over the last 20 years, we’ve built up extensive expertise in this field - not just with the semiconductor technology itself but also in terms of the packaging that’s required.
“Working with mmWave is challenging and you can often end up losing the signal entirely. Everything that can go wrong will! Alot of the work that’s gone into our products - the silicon itself - was done at imec and the challenge for us was while we could make the technology work in the laboratory, we needed to ensure that the silicon worked for manufacturability. That required planning and building facilities from scratch.”
As with the development of silicon, the packaging technology was also problematic, and avoiding what Van Thillo described as exotic packaging methods they worked to create RFICs built for manufacturability in high volumes. Likewise with RF test equipment - the company has developed its own full hardware and software test programs.
“We are a fabless semiconductor company and we’re designing and developing mmWave radio frequency (RF) technology for next-generation wireless applications and our products include RFIC semiconductors, phased antenna arrays and software solutions. We want to accelerate the adoption of these technologies which can deliver much higher frequencies and bandwidths and give customers the ability to integrate massive data pipes into their legacy products as they look to embrace the next generation of wireless.”
Those solutions are intended for a number of fast-growing markets including broadband 5G Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) – where the issues are most critical - but also consumer electronic (CE) products such as high-resolution displays, virtual and augmented reality headsets, smart cities, autonomous mobility applications, medical and industrial automation.
Pharrowtech was recently awarded a grant from the European Innovation Council (EIC) Accelerator programme to accelerate the development and commercialisation of its next-generation technology – in this case Wi-Fi, which is said to carry more than two thirds of all wireless data globally.
The 60 GHz band
Pharrowtech's solutions leverage very high frequencies in the 60 GHz band to deliver both ultra-fast speeds exceeding several gigabits-per-second (Gbps) at low-latency and high reliability. Its technology allows users to keep up with the continued explosive growth in data consumption with the likes of Wi-Fi 8 and beyond, which is expected to be specified as IEEE 802.11bq.
“The company came out of the research we began at imec and was a response to the challenge of managing the ever-growing consumption of data. We knew as far back as the 1980s that we were fast outstripping the bandwidth capabilities of existing wireless technologies, so our work has been on the mmWave spectrum, from 24 GHz up to 100 GHz.”
According to Van Thillo, Pharrowtech focused on the unlicensed 60 GHz band as it promises significant bandwidth improvements and last year the company launched the PTR1060, an IEEE 802.11ay-compliant fully integrated CMOS beamforming transceiver chip that supports the entire 57 to 71 GHz band. It also offers the PTM1060 phased array antenna module, which includes the PTR1060.
“We were also using Renesas’ RWM6050 or RWM6051 baseband processors so we could offer ready-to-integrate or ready-to-deploy 60 GHz solutions and due to Pharrowtech’s phased antenna array designs, integration and testing capabilities, system manufacturers can customise the RFM according to their own specifications,” added Van Thillo,
The PTR1060 is a high-performance, low power consumption 60 GHz RF transceiver developed using CMOS technology and is a fully integrated beamforming transceiver solution, with 32 transmit and 32 receive paths along with a Tx-Rx switch.
Modem connectivity is provided through an analogue baseband I/Q interface, and a wide beam book enables independent fine beam steering capabilities for both the receiver and transmitter.
Above: Pharrowtech's PTR1060 60 GHz RF transceiver developed using CMOS technology
Functionality on a single package
“That is a lot of functionality on a single RFIC package, and we believe that out IC removes a lot of the implementation challenges for customers. We’re addressing the issue of complexity, so our customers don’t need to worry. The hardware, but also the software, is fully integrated – beamforming, for example, is a very specific problem and it requires algorithmic software content. While it’s quite easy to correct the beam outdoors, it’s become more of an issue in doors, where users of VR headsets, for example, will be moving continuously, which means that the beam will need to adapt quickly. We deliver a complete solution, so the customer doesn’t have to worry about it.”
Beamforming creates a directed beam of RF energy by applying phase shifts on the signals to different antennas in an antenna array. Pharrowtech has created a beam book which is a list of entries out of which a specific beam configuration can be configured in whatever direction is required. Customers also have the ability to customise it.
According to Van Thillo the focus on 60 GHz was due to the amount of unlicensed bandwidth that was available.
“We can use it to support new wireless technologies, whether that’s 5G, Wi-Fi 8 or beyond,” Van Thillo explained. “In terms of scalability we chose to use CMOS technology because the other options that were available, such as GaN for example, would never scale to the volumes that would be required.”
While 60 GHz mmWave offers high-bandwidth data communications, there are several challenges in using it so, as a result, 60 GHz tends to be limited to short-range communications.
“But that meets the needs of network operators who are more focused on increasing the densification of small-cell wireless networks,” explained Van Thillo. “Our technology removes the need for extensive cabling and our beamforming capabilities mean that we can steer the signal.”
Because the propagation range at 60 GHz tends to line-of-sight Pharrowtech’s beamforming solutions deliver better link resilience and the use of beamforming and that limited range makes it possible for spatial reuse of frequencies, which helps to increase the capacity of the network.
Commenting on the use of 60 GHz mmWave, Van Thillo noted that while propagation is less far, requiring line of sight, “Whatever the cell size, you’ll have most of the bandwidth to yourself and we believe that mmWave is the best way forward in delivering greater bandwidth.
“The future for this technology looks very positive and we are currently in a growing number of evaluations where customers want to deploy in outdoor markets like fixed wireless access, point-to-point, multi-point link because that’s where the technology can really deliver,” concluded Van Thillo.
