The heavy traffic loads and advanced capabilities that 5G supports require semiconductor numbers and performance that are unprecedented in mobile networks. And the slow but steady adoption of virtualized core and RAN architectures opens up the base station, for the first time, to merchant and even general-purpose processors, rather than running entirely on proprietary, special-purpose chips commissioned by the large vendors. In recent issues we have looked at the battles in the market for accelerator cards to offload the most demanding RAN tasks (at Layer 1 of the network) from the central processor. Last week we considered the start-up Accelercomm, one of a band of silicon IP providers that are targeting chips to optimize specific and critical aspects of 5G…