Xilinx has been making a major play for an increased place in the RAN platform and has been particularly successful in forging ties with Japanese companies in the Open RAN sector. It has alliances with Fujitsu (for the Ultrascale RF side of its portfolio) and NTT Docomo, and it has now expanded its relationship with NEC, whose next generation of Open RAN 5G radio units (RUs) will include Xilinx Versal cores. The FPGA (field programmable gate array) pioneer has three key elements to its 5G strategy: a telco accelerator card, launched in summer 2020 and specifically designed to offload demanding functions from the processor in a distributed unit a Smart NIC (network interface card), announced in April 2021 the Versal…