Marvell has been steadily expanding its position in the RAN market with chips for many elements of the disaggregated 5G architecture, and has strategic deals with Nokia and Samsung, the biggest hitters in the Open RAN space, and with Fujitsu.
One of the commercial fruits of the alliance with Samsung is a new system-on-chip (SoC) to be used in Massive MIMO and other advanced radio units for an Open RAN or virtualized RAN environment. The SoC was jointly developed, harnessing Marvell’s processors to support the demanding beamforming requirements of Massive MIMO, and also using some Samsung IP. It is the companies’ first jointly developed single-chip radio and their first to support mid-band M-MIMO.
Products based on the chip will be commercialized during the second quarter in sub-6 GHz bands, mainly 3.5 GHz. While Massive MIMO is often associated with millimeter wave spectrum, operators are interested in the antenna arrays for the mid-bands because they allow an existing site grid – for 2.5 GHz 4G, for instance – to be used almost unchanged for 3.5 GHz 5G, because of M-MIMO’s range improvements over conventional antennas.
Massive MIMO is an effective way to improve capacity, coverage and spectral efficiency for mid-band and high-band spectrum, but it comes with trade-offs in terms of the weight and size of the units (and associated tower costs) and of power consumption. Vendors have been racing to address these issues, as seen in recent launches of compact units by Huawei and Ericsson. Now Samsung says the new SoC will support 4G/5G multimode networks in a unit with reduced footprint compared to earlier single-mode Samsung designs and with savings of up to 70% in chipset power consumption.
The two companies added 5G RAN R&D to an existing RAN alliance, of about six years’ standing, a year ago and cited the challenges of reducing processing and power levels in Massive MIMO as a key focus of attention. Marvell silicon is already present in some other Samsung 5G products but this is the first that sits within the M-MIMO radio, rather than the baseband or modem, to run all the beamforming algorithms.
“This is a single-chip solution and therefore it compresses quite a lot of functionality and algorithms into a single SoC, and it drives down power consumption and it improves the size of the radio,” Alok Shah, VP of networks strategy at Samsung Networks, told SDxCentral.
Shah added: “Samsung has an innate advantage by being an expert in semiconductors ourselves” while Marvell contributes “expertise in processors to bring the most effective beamforming chips that we could to market”.
“When you have that dramatic a reduction in power, the thing that it most affects is the body of the box. You don’t have to disperse so much heat, and that also directly affects what pole it sits on, what the cost of that is, and what the labor cost is to deploy it. It’s secondary, tertiary effects that benefit the capex for the deployment,” said Raj Singh, EVP of Marvell’s processors business group.
Earlier this year, Samsung announced its commercial 5G vRAN and Verizon was revealed as its first commercial deployer. The Korean vendor has been a leader in M-MIMO, particularly for millimeter wave spectrum (hence its significance to Verizon, the biggest deployer of mmWave 5G). Samsung has also shipped “tens of thousands” of M-MIMO radios to Korean and Japanese customers, based on its previous silicon, but going forward, will only use the new SoC.