Qualcomm’s huge power in the mobile semiconductor world has been mainly concentrated on the device side, but just over a year ago, the firm said it would re-enter the infrastructure market for the first time since it sold its network chip business to Ericsson in 1999. Like many other firms from various sectors, it aims to ride on the Open RAN wave to penetrate the formerly closed world of the RAN, and has announced chips to power Open RAN distributed units (DUs) and radio units (RUs), as well as a strategic co-development with Vodafone Group. There is clearly strong potential for Qualcomm to shake up the market, and challenge the early movers in developing cloud-based DU processors and accelerators, such…