Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Samsung Begins Mass Production of Its Own 5G Chips (zdnet.com)

Posted by msmash on from the up-next dept.

Samsung Electronics has started mass-producing its 5G chips, the company said. From a report: Among the company's new chip offerings is the Exynos Modem 5100, which contains a 5G multi-mode chipset; it is the same chipset that is used to power the Galaxy S10 5G, which became available for sale in South Korea as of Wednesday. The model, unveiled in August, is the world's first 5G modem to be compatible with the 3GPP's 5G New Radio (5G-NR) standard. Mass production for its single-chip radio frequency transceiver, the Exynos RF 5500, and supply modulator solution, the Exynos SM 5800, have also started, Samsung said. These technologies also power Samsung's flagship 5G phone. The Exynos RF 5500 has 14 receiver paths for download, 4x4 MIMO (Multiple-Input, Multiple-Output), and a higher-order 256 QAM (Quadrature Amplitude Modulation) scheme for data transfer in 5G networks; and the Eyxnos SM5800 is 30% more power efficient than previous offerings.

2 of 26 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Might wait this out another year... by Dorianny · · Score: 3, Informative

    Smartphone 5G is of little use to anyone that doesn't live in a density populated area where airwaves congestion is a real issue. The networks should be subsidizing 5G radio's, it is a technology that mainly benefits them by getting the most bang with the least amount of frequency space

  2. Re:Better certification system needed. by tlhIngan · · Score: 3, Informative

    Frankly, every wireless chipset (not just GSM version xyz) has been one shitty implementation after another. Since we're putting these things in everything from pocket computers to infrastructure, we need to start having stringent chipset testing to ensure they cannot be exploited. I there are few (if any) wireless chipsets that can actually stand up to fuzzing let alone a reverse engineering attack.

    We really need a certification body that actually tests chipsets to ensure that at the very least they won't fault/reboot (indicative of being exploitable) when they are fuzzed. Frankly, I would think to have the highest level of certification from this body that your code would have be formally verified. Considering they are a small isolated system, this isn't a Herculean task.

    Actually, it's a fairly difficult problem because you're talking real time systems verification and dozens of threads that can interact with each other, only a tiny combination of which if a packet of type Z arrives and within 1.2 ms a packet of type Y comes in, there's an exploitable window of 50 ms where if you send a packet of type A, the modem drops.

    It's a heavily multitasked system of which there's at least a couple of processors mandatory (a DSP and a control processor) all trying to handle dozens of events that can happen.

    And it's possible - think of a high speed download taking place alongside a call, the signal is fading out and the radio has to do a handoff procedure to get onto the next cell it can see, but because the road you're on is at the cell boundaries, just as soon as it's done one handoff, it needs to restart it to handle the new cell.

    These edge cases cause all sorts of thread timing issues which can expose vulnerabilities, or even smash the stack.

    Many years ago, I worked on a cellphone design. We discovered through user testing that the subway would routinely crash the modem firmware (when it goes into a tunnel suddenly and then exits it) All we could do is simply ask for firmware updates and providing them with logs of the modem and keep re-trying the scenario.