SOLiD Millimeter Wave 5G Cell Repeater Technician User Interface

In a nutshell, this spectrum of radio is very directional. In order for this repeater to work, the antennas must steer a beam toward each other. The beam is steered by the relative micotiming of the signal between these innocuous PCB dots that act as antennas. There’s a giant heat sink behind bare die on the other side of the PCB. These chips handle the timing for steering while funneling the raw signal through. I worked initially on the signal-steering stuff.

In order to steer the beam, the team needed a software control panel. My first role was to develop this control panel, and the wifi programming serial module integration to the device main-brain firmware. Soon, I moved from the user interface over to the firmware on the device where I came up with the code adaptation bits that optimized the team past stuck points in the automatic beam searching algorithm to finally achieve fully automated beam steering, making the original manual method only for confirmation fine tuning and diagnostic troubleshooting.

I worked with Intel to fine-tune the FPGA flashing procedure at scale and optimize the RTL.

I also provided video production for marketing.

In this interface image, this was how we steered the beam during early development. The interface evolved from here as it melded together with the automatic beam-finding algo I co-developed. Special thanks to Sasan at Ionotronics. We had a later dark interface that looked more modern but I don’t have a picture of it anymore unfortunately.

This project dissolved in early 2021 when Verizon sold their millimeter wave bands to a company that provides stationary home internet, really wide area network style, sort of like ISP.NET. This derailed the use case of our team’s unit.