MediaTek’s new M80 cellular modem brings the power of mmWave 5G

MediaTek has today launched a new cellular modem – the M80 – which succeeds the M70 5G modem that was launched back in 2018. The biggest upgrade offered by the new M80 5G modem is support for mmWave 5G, alongside the Sub-6 GHz network on a single chip. It is claimed to be compatible with both SA (standalone) and NSA (non-standalone) architecture, and comes with a host of other features such as dual 5G SIM, dual 5G NSA and SA networks, and dual Voice over New Radio (VoNR) to name a few.

With the M80 5G modem, MediaTek is promising more reliable network coverage and higher power-efficiency as well. It supports 5G carrier aggregation with mixed duplex (TDD+FDD) as well as Dynamic Spectrum Sharing (DSS) – touted to be a cost-effective route for a more robust 5G rollout – to enable parallel use of LTE and 5G in the same frequency band and dynamically allocate resources based on bandwidth demand. The chipmaker is touting 7.67Gbps downlink and 3.76Gbp uplink peaks with its latest offering.

As far as support for radio access technology goes, the M80 5G modem is ready for 4G LTE Cat-19 DL up to 5CC, 5G NR (FR1) more than 2CC, 5G mmWave (FR2) up to 8C as well as FR1 + FR2 dual connectivity and carrier aggregation. Coming to the boost in power efficiency, the new cellular modem relies on MediaTek’s UltraSave Network Environment Detection and UltraSave OTA Content Awareness technologies for dynamically adjusting power configuration and operating frequency depending upon the network environment.

“The M80 also integrates MediaTek’s Dynamic Bandwidth Part (BWP) technology which is designed to optimize bandwidth use to accommodate light or heavy data throughput requests,” MediaTek adds. And to ensure that the modem remains active in a connected standby mode even if users are not using mobile data, the new MediaTek 5G modem relies on what the company calls Connected Mode DRX (C-DRX) technology. MediaTek has also been strengthening its portfolio of high-end 5G SoCs, launching the Dimensity 1100 and Dimensity 1200 processors earlier this month.