6G will usher in a new era for all industries

At this early stage, 6G wide-area wireless has few technology blueprints or a well-known official name, but the implications are the beginning of a new era of business opportunities for manufacturers as semiconductors made of new materials and compounds are used in the next generation of transmitters and satellites.

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A report by IDTechEx points out that the impact of 6G communications on future industries may be even greater than that of 5G, which is currently being promoted worldwide. For 5G and 6G, the business opportunities in software, hardware and materials will be enormous.

In November 2020, China successfully launched a 6G experimental satellite "University of Electronic Science and Technology" (Star Era-12/Tianyan 05). This experiment to explore 6G through a low-orbit satellite uses terahertz communication as a new spectrum resource for the world's sixth-generation mobile communications, and its technological development and breakthroughs are particularly important. After the successful launch of the world's first experimental satellite, we expect the first terahertz frequency band experiment after entering orbit to bring breakthrough development to this research-significant experiment.

One of the concepts behind 6G is that the world will enter an era where signals will provide power to battery-free devices for the first time in the future. That is, smart reconfigurable surfaces and software-controlled hypersurfaces will be developed. IDTechEx points out that under this new technology, there is still a lot of necessary new hardware that does not exist today.

In the foreseeable future, with thousands of low-orbit satellites in the stratosphere, terahertz transistors and solar drones will be able to operate. Therefore, governments and companies will invest tens of billions of dollars to compete for 6G technology. For material suppliers, 6G means that the application of graphene and metamaterials in the fields of heat, light, electricity and electronics is crucial, so hybrid materials will become more important.

IDTechEx pointed out that China's solar-powered drone "Phantom" for fast Wi-Fi emergency networks and operating at an altitude of 4,600 meters can communicate with 6G high-altitude drones and low-orbit satellites.

In short, even though 5G has just been launched, countries are making plans at different speeds in order to seize 6G, which will be commercially available in 2028. For example:

• Samsung has released a 6G white paper;
• In April 2020, Japan announced the establishment of the main technical strategic goals for 6G by 2025;
• China also established the National 6G Technology R&D Promotion Working Group and the Overall Expert Group in November 2019.

In December 2020, Nokia was appointed to lead the European Commission's 6G research program Hexa-X project, and Ericsson will serve as the technical manager of the project.

Orange, TIM, Telefonica, Intel and Siemens are partners.

Today, low-orbit satellites are considered one of the key technologies in 6G, which plays a key role in more extreme IoT applications such as self-driving cars and natural disaster prediction.