TOKYO, February 14, 2018 - Mitsubishi Electric Corporation (TOKYO: 6503) announced today that it has developed a 16-beam spatial-multiplexing technology operating at 28GHz for fifth-generation (5G) mobile base stations and that it has demonstrated what is believed to be the world's first¹5G system to achieve 25.5Gbps for one user device at 28GHz with 500MHz bandwidth. Mitsubishi Electric expects its new mobile system to help realize a society in which mobile devices are connected ubiquitously via broadband transmission. The details of the system will be announced at the IEICE Technical Committee on Radio Communication Systems conference on February 28. Outdoor trials are planned in fiscal 2018.

1 According to Mitsubishi Electric research as of February 14, 2018

The 16-beam spatial-multiplexing technology consists of eight analog, front-end processing, low-power units to form 16 beams and a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) digital processing algorithm to reduce inter-beam interference. The new system's realizes the gain of 4,096 antenna elements while its computational complexity is just that of 16 antenna elements. The new mobile telecommunication system operating at 28GHz yielded spectral efficiency of 63.7bps/Hz² and a downlink transmission rate of 25.5Gbps, both believed to be world's firsts, with 500MHz bandwidth for one user device.

2 Time occupancy for downlink transmission is assumed to be 80% during the transmission interval. The remainder of the interval is used for uplink transmission.

The two-beam massive MIMO antenna RF module includes two active phased array antenna (APAA) units operating at 28GHz, each consisting of densely integrated 256 antenna elements and RF devices. The RF module's thickness of just 7cm, roughly one-third that of a predecessor unit, will enable easy installation for wide deployment of 5G systems.