There are three main trends currently impacting microwave and millimeter-wave spectrum management, emerging 5G technologies, a millimeter-wave migration, and the growth of mission-critical applications using wireless communications and sensing technology. Essentially, sub-6 GHz 5G technologies up to 5 GHz are beginning to be deployed around the world, with planned wide-scale urban and factory deployments of millimeter-wave 5G technologies. Furthermore, other wireless communication technologies are also seeing greater adoption and further cluttering the spectrum below 6 GHz. This is causing
many sensitive applications and critical applications to evaluate higher frequencies for their applications to avoid the clutter, enable higher bandwidth use cases, and ensure reliable and low-latency operation.

Hence, the threat of spectrum clutter and interference, along with the potential benefits of higher bandwidth and higher frequency bands, is encouraging research and development of a variety of applications well into the millimeter-wave frequencies. This is also leading to the reforming of several use cases, some requiring strict spectrum management guidelines, and some that even the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) and other agencies are concerned that may threaten national security due to the potential for interference of critical radio navigation services.

There are now often too many interference and spectrum management concerns to account for to have absolute confidence that a new deployment or new technology will work reliably in the field. Hence, custom filter solutions are becoming increasingly important for the development and deployment of today’s generation of wireless communications and sensing systems. Though the process of designing a custom filter is complex and requires skilled engineers, manufacturing capability, and advanced quality control procedures, this process can be made much simpler with the help of a custom filter solutions partner, such as Spectrum Control.