Xilinx said that it will supply chips for deployment in a new open-standard 5G network to be rolled out in the US by the end of the year, giving it another foothold in the growing market for base station chips.
The Santa Clara, California-based company said it will roll out its UltraScale+ technology to Fujitsu for use in 5G telecom gear based on a standard for open radio access networks, called open RAN (O-RAN). Xilinx said the UltraScale+ devices used within Fujitsu's open radio units (O-RUs) deliver "the best balance" of cost, performance, adaptability, and scalability required for the needs of 5G networks.
A base station is a set of boxes used to connect smartphones and other devices to cellular networks. Today, these boxes are sold primarily by telecom equipment giants such as Nokia, Ericsson, Samsung, Huawei Technologies and other firms including Fujitsu as end-to-end systems, each with proprietary packages of hardware and software that clash with products designed by rival telecom gear makers.
The emerging O-RAN standard acts as a software interface between subsystems in a 5G base station, giving telecom companies the ability to mix and match baseband, radio, or other components. O-RAN promises to give companies the flexibility to add features to 5G networks faster and more cheaply by upgrading software or swapping out radios with alternatives based on O-RAN-compatible ICs.
The standard supports "functional splits" within a 5G base station, ranging from the radio units (RUs) that manage radio frequency functions and the distributed units (DUs) used in baseband processing.
Xilinx is wrestling to win more market share in the 5G infrastructure market from other chip-making giants such as Intel, Qualcomm, Marvell and Broadcom. It is also competing indirectly with custom-designed chips from Nokia, Huawei, Ericsson, and other top telecom manufacturers. Qualcomm, the world's largest smartphone chip maker, plans to start sampling its 5G base station chips in 2022.
Xilinx said the deal includes its programmable radio-frequency system-on-a-chip (RFSoC) devices for the open RAN market. The vendor also said that Fujitsu is evaluating RFSoCs to further reduce cost and power consumption for future deployments. Xilinx, which has agreed to be acquired by AMD in a $35 billion deal, said it will continue to work with industry partners to build out O-RAN solutions.
Liam Madden, EVP and GM of the wired and wireless business at Xilinx, said the combined product will be rolled out on "a major greenfield 5G network" by an unnamed US wireless carrier later in 2021.
With multi-gigabit 5G speeds, reliability, security, and ultra-low latency, the 5G rollout will impact consumers, businesses, governments, and institutions all over the world, transforming every industry and life as we know it. In fact, according to recent data from IHS Markit, the 5G value chain will support 22.8 million jobs and deliver $3.8 trillion in economic output by 2035.
Surging demand for 5G smartphones—Qualcomm expects over 750 million 5G smartphones to be shipped by 2022—will accelerate the race toward one billion 5G connections globally by 2023, outpacing 4G adoption by two years. Behind these dizzying stats lies a herculean challenge: Taming complexity as new smartphones are required to support legacy 2G/3G/4G and a host of new 5G frequency bands, such as sub-6-GHz and mmWave. Such capabilities will ultimately help deliver broader coverage, multi-gigabit speeds, and high-speed internet access to mobile devices and many new segments as automotive, infrastructure, connectivity, and industrial IoT.
The 5G Economy, an independent study from IHS Markit, commissioned by Qualcomm Technologies Inc., November 2020.
The adoption of 5G will enable many industries to fast track their digital transformation, leading to better efficiencies and competitiveness. However, 5G is much more complex than previous generations. Smartphone OEMs and new wireless providers offering 5G solutions can no longer rely on component-centric approaches to meet customer expectations. To reap the full benefits of 5G, OEMs must look to a complete modem-to-antenna system solution.
Complexity Tsunami
The promise of delivering 5G globally can only be realized by taming RF front-end (RFFE) complexity in 5G devices. In the early stages of 4G, there were just 16 RF band carrier aggregation combinations. By contrast, we expect over 10,000 band combinations with 5G in the next few years alone, a complexity tsunami that has a direct impact on the design, assembly, and certification of 5G smartphones.
From modem to antenna, new 5G mobile devices must dance between myriad frequency bands and RF technologies, including MIMO (4x4 DL, 2x2 UL); Dynamic Spectrum Sharing (DSS); E-UTRAN New Radio – Dual Connectivity (EN-DC); beamsteering; carrier aggregation; and mmWave.
Moreover, the RFFE is a tangled web of existing and new low-, mid-, and high-spectrum bands, unlicensed bands (CBRS, etc.), navigation technologies, and short-range connectivity solutions including Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth. A broad range of RF technologies and frequency bands will demand a host of new filters/power amplifiers/low-noise amplifiers on the smartphone RFFE architecture, allowing 5G smartphones to tune all of these frequencies simultaneously, precisely, and with less disturbance while requiring minimum battery power consumption.
Burrowing down deeper, the quantum leap in complexity can be seen at the filter and antenna level, too. While today we speak in the range of 100 filters on a single premium 5G smartphone, 4G phones initially came with less than 30 filters.
Another hurdle is the diverse array of antennas required for the precise tuning of the many new bands/technologies entering the marketplace. Today, we typically work with eight to 10 antennas (on a premium 5G phone we can expect 10 antennas), whereas the initial 4G/5G phones supported six antennas.
Finally, all of these components must be elegantly squeezed into ever-shrinking 5G form factors and extensively tested globally to deliver the best modem-to-antenna RF quality. This will help ensure your phone seamlessly works wherever you are around the world.
Why Move to a Complete Modem-to-Antenna Solution?
Though the complexity labyrinth can be challenging to navigate, here are six reasons why OEMs and new wireless vendors should move to a complete modem-to-antenna solution:
- A complete solution maximizes a device’s system performance by benefiting from hardware-software co-design advantages. This results in a better user experience—data speeds, coverage, responsiveness, fewer dropped calls, sleeker devices—while lowering device power consumption.
- With a proven modem-to-antenna solution, OEMs and wireless vendors can spend less time on hardware integration and testing, focusing more on the industrial design and user interface, creating better products.
- Faster integration of new 5G technologies and use cases.
- Pre-baked, comprehensive solutions help reduce the R&D burden on OEMs while lowering the cost for 5G development, design, assembly, and production.
- Reduces time for device testing and certification for operators around the world.
- Simplifies the modem-RF procurement process.
Engineers and designers throughout the world are acting quickly to adopt complete modem-to-antenna solutions, including LG, Motorola, OnePlus, OPPO, Samsung, Sony, Vivo, Xiaomi, and many more. As 5G’s footprint continues to grow, OEMs and wireless providers must integrate the best RFFE solution to realize the promise of the 5G future, helping their customers reap the rewards of high-speed connectivity, reliability, and ultra-low latency.
February 06, 2021 at 03:04AM
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Xilinx to Supply RF Chips for Open Standard 5G Network in the US - Electronic Design
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