6G Hardware 2025 Report Series Reflects New Realities
Zhar Research has completed a new set of five reports on materials and hardware opportunities that will emerge from 6G Communications 2025-2045.
Dr Peter Harrop CEO says,
Some of the material and device candidates for manipulating 6G frequencies. Source: Zhar Research report, “6G Communications Grand Overview: Materials, Hardware Markets 2025-2045”.
“The reports are almost entirely rewritten this year for two reasons. There has been a flood of new research progress to analyse through 2024 and understanding of the best way forward has changed. To succeed financially and invigorate telecoms and personal device markets, 6G will need a difficult, disruptive Phase Two after the initial launch in 2030 which will largely be based on incremental advances. At start, Phase One may not stretch beyond 100GHz or so. It will then progress to around 300GHz but even that will not deliver targetted heroic parameters like 1Tbps or even much more than 5G’s coverage of under 15% of the Earth’s surface. Defaulting to satcom and other mere GHz performance can enhance coverage but the industry must do far better if it is to galvanise sales.”
In his opinion,
“That means higher frequencies but intense work on 0.3-1THz transmissions and reconfigurable intelligent surfaces RIS to enhance the propagation path is still not giving a prospect of viable outdoor communication using these frequencies. Attention is therefore pivoting to near infrared and, for instance underwater, some visible light transmission. Communication using these frequencies has been demonstrated from satellites and high-altitude pseudo satellites HAPS which are solar inflatables and unmanned aircraft loitering in the stratosphere. On land, appropriate RIS trialled are mostly based on myriads of moving micro-mirrors but solid stat options are arriving.”
The reports concentrate particularly on newly prioritised aspects, such as that optical transmission, HAPS beating satellites on cost, latency and more and client devices becoming “zero energy devices” thanks to on-board multi-mode energy harvesting and simultaneous wireless information and power transfer SWIPT.
Harrop adds,
“All this drives us to pay more attention to ultra-wide bandgap semiconductors and particularly dielectrics and regard transitioning to multipurpose smart materials a necessity not a luxury. The challenges are so great, we must embrace new materials sectors such as all-dielectric metamaterials, graphene plasmonics and heat removal, and ionogels. Some will prove to be very useful. Fit-and-forget will be taken far more seriously given 6G infrastructure in remote places, embedded IOT nodes and personal devices kept for far longer. Self-healing materials are part of that.”
The Zhar Research materials and hardware report series therefore has changed titles and focus this year. Drilling down from the report, “6G Communications Grand Overview: Materials, Hardware Markets 2025-2045” are:
Also available on www.giiresearch.com.