Stefan Mileschin

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.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/13702...ference-design