A Quick Look at Qualcomm’s 5G Smartphone Reference Design

One of the exciting things on display at Qualcomm's Snapdragon tech summit was their 5G reference smartphone design – the one that gets handed around to the smartphone vendors so they can initiate their own designs. Reference platforms are usually base and ‘generally good’ all-around designs that OEMs can take as a starting point, and so Qualcomm had to address one of the main issues with 5G with its QRD: size. Thanks to the extra 5G modem and the many antennas required for mmWave frequencies, 5G requires a good deal more hardware than current 4G phones. Qualcomm's reference design, in turn, is of reasonable dimensions, and not completely out of place amongst the larger modern smartphones of today.