Xilinx, which is likely to be acquired by AMD this year, made a significant play for the open RAN market last summer when it launched its Telco Accelerator Card, with O-RAN networks specifically in mind. But it is looking for a wider role in this space, aware that to make an open vRAN software ecosystem tenable, it will be necessary to have high performance semiconductors that can support the capabilities of a 5G macro network without the need for vendor-proprietary ASICs.
The FPGA supplier has scored a significant win in this fledgling environment with a deal to power Fujitsu’s O-RAN 5G radio unit (RU), which are being developed for the US market and deployed by Dish in its greenfield open 5G network. Fujitsu will use Xilinx’s UltraScale+ architecture, which implements and RF system-on-chip (RFSoC) in 16-nanometer and 20-nm technology. The integrated nature of the RFSoC, and the geometries in use, should support cost and power efficiency, said Xilinx’s general manager Liam Madden.
The contract will be a strong proof point for Xilinx. Madden commented: “As the market needs for 5G continue to evolve, Fujitsu also recognized the importance of integrating Xilinx adaptable RFSoCs to address the evolution of standards for next-generation radio deployments.”
The RFSoC is just one component that Xilinx hopes to push into O-RAN platforms. For demanding vRAN elements, such as distributed units designed to support ultra-low latency 5G RAN processes, its FPGAs will be an option to enable acceleration, offloading processor-intensive tasks from the CPU. The FPGA T1 Telco Accelerator Card is designed to lower the cost and complexity of such systems by adopting the popular and cost-effective PCI Express (PCIe) card form factor.
According to Mike Wissolik, director of wired and wireless product marketing, the T1 was made by “taking the chips that we already deploy in baseband units today and sticking them on PCI express cards with processor acceleration.” The card can then be installed in a commodity server to support the offload of demanding processes from the x86 processor.
Wissolik said the open RAN trend is opening up new customer bases – smaller vendors, but also operators which want to assemble their own multivendor systems and escape supplier lock-in. It was the operator community which mainly requested Xilinx to develop a simple-to-deploy implementation of its existing technology. By plugging in the T1 card, the operator can either use fewer x86 cores or servers for a DU, or free up CPU cores to run other services.
The T1 handles traffic to and from the virtualized baseband to multiple radio units, and is just one example of the use of accelerators to ensure that vRANs do not trade performance for openness. A typical processor-intensive function to offload would be channel encoding/decoding using hardened LDPC and turbo codecs. Xilinx claims that offloading those critical channel coding functions from the CPU to the T1 card delivers up to 45 times better throughput in encoding and 23 time better in decoding, compared to the same server working without acceleration. It also delivers power and cost savings compared to the non-accelerated model.
Other recent open RAN developments:
Indonesia hosts latest TIP Community Lab
Indonesia is exactly the kind of market that could be significantly impacted by an open RAN platform that gained market scale. It is the world’s third largest country by population but it has never risen to the mobile broadband challenge as effectively as other large emerging economies, thanks to a combination of regulatory hurdles, stagnant market structure, major geographical coverage issues and other problems. However, a more affordable and deployable RAN, with developments geared to remote communities, could change the economics of 4G and future 5G for Indonesian operators.
It is no surprise, then, that the country is hosting the latest Telecom Infra Project (TIP) Community Lab, which just opened in Bandung for operators and stakeholders to test and validate open systems. The Lab is located in the Telkom University and supported by the GSMA, TIP founder Facebook and various vendors including Altiostar, Mavenir, Parallel Wireless, Baicells, Comba Telecom, Amdocs and IBM. It is the fourteenth in TIP’s global string of labs and the first in south east Asia.
The country’s five mobile operators – Telkomsel, Indosat Ooredoo, XL Axiata, Smartfren and Hutchison 3 Indonesia – and ISP Net-1, are all involved too. Parallel Wireless has been active in the country and has engaged in tests or lab trials with all the MNOs except Hutchison 3 (which may soon merge with Indosat), and has moved on to field trials with Smartfren and Indosat. Mavenir has an open RAN deal with an unnamed Indonesian operator.
Telefónica UK completes trial with NEC, plans roll-out in Germany
Telefónica O2 UK is running an open RAN trial with Japan’s NEC, which has gained a high profile among UK policy makers engaged with the country’s effort to diversify the 5G supply chain following the exclusion of Huawei. NEC is the UK government’s launch partner for its NeutrORAN project, which will “test and demonstrate a multiple operator, neutral host solution using an Open RAN ecosystem”.
O2 said the two firms had completed a “successful” trial at NEC’s UK Center of Excellence, on O2’s network. While NEC provides 5G O-RAN radios, in this trial it was acting as a systems integrator and supporting test and verification, while the radio units came from GigaTera and Supermicro, running vRAN software from Altiostar.
The operator is also running other trials in a bid to put smaller vendors through their paces in various RAN scenarios where they might replace or complement the incumbent giants Nokia and Ericsson. The trial partners include Mavenir, DenseAir and WaveMobile. O2 has also trialled in-building open RAN deployment, working with Mavenir partner Vilicom.
As yet, none of these efforts has led to a commercial contract though its sister company, Telefónica O2 Germany, is also working with NEC and plans to deploy open RAN technology in its production network later this year. In Germany, NEC is coordinating the deployment and operation of a network at three mobile sites in the Bavarian town of Landsberg am Lech.
Benetel targets open indoor networks with RAN550 radio unit
Many early commercial deployments of O-RAN networks are likely to be in enterprise environments, where they can be deployed in greenfield cellular systems with moderate traffic loads and performance requirements compared to 5G macro networks. This means that indoor performance and coverage will be critical, and Benetel is the latest member of the small cell-focused end of the O-RAN ecosystem to target this opportunity.
Benetel has added an O-RAN compliant radio unit (O-RU) called the RAN550 O-RAN to its portfolio, claiming this delivers 100 MHz of instantaneous bandwidth, with up to 250mW of output power per transmitter path. The unit supports the O-RAN Alliance’s preferred functional split between RU and baseband, Split 7.2, and its open fronthaul specifications. It is equipped with two 10Gigabit Ethernet ports for fronthaul network interfacing and 4×4 MIMO antennas.
The initial release will support the 5G n78 band (3.3 GHz to 3.8 GHz), with additional frequencies (upper n77 band and n79 band) under development.