Analog Devices and Marvell demo a next-gen 5G huge MIMO Radio unit. At the Mobile World Congress this past week the two companies showcased a Next-Generation 5G Huge MIMO radio unit that is a reference design platform. It also has support for Open RAN.
The system is a combination of ADI’s latest RadioVerse Transceiver SoC, and the Marvell OCTEON 10 Fusion 5G baseband processor. This is an industry first as far as being a 5nm digital beamforming solution for 5G. There is an improvement in time-to-market for advanced mMIMO radio units and O-RAN support and smaller size and lower weight, with 40% lower energy consumption overall.
The OCTEON 10 Fusion is a baseband processor that also provides flexible L1 implementation. There is hardware and software reuse across the Distributed Unit (DU) and the Radio Unit (RU). This will facilitate L1 spills that evolve among operators worldwide. This would then function across the coming years. The RadioVerse SoC provides extensive digital RF frontend abilities with field-proven DPD
“As mMIMO radio functionality grows in complexity, more specialized silicon approaches are required,” said Alex Jinsung Choi, Chairman of the O-RAN ALLIANCE. “Reference designs like the one created by ADI and Marvell help catalyze the O-RAN market for 5G mMIMO radio units by enabling advanced configurations that meet network operators’ high expectations for power efficiency and performance.”
Working in concert the RadioVerse Transceiver SoC and the OCTEON 10 Fusion support the entire signal chain with a great deal of RU system efficiency. The RadioVerse Transceiver SoC is the ADRV9040 and includes substantial digital abilities. Those capabilities include linearization algorithms for boosting power amplifier performance and efficiency. Additionally, it also has digital channel filters to reduce interface rates.
The OCTEON 10 Fusion 5G baseband processor offers specialized accelerators optimized to efficiently process complex beamforming algorithms. Along with dedicated processors for low PHY baseband. The PHY basebands can then be configured for various O-RAN split 7.2x configurations.
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“Marvell is pleased to collaborate with ADI in taking mMIMO radios to the next level,” said Will Chu, Senior Vice President, of the Processors Business Group at Marvell. “The combination of Marvell’s OCTEON 10 Fusion 5G baseband processor and ADI’s leading RF transceiver technology provides OEMs a 5G Open Radio Unit reference design that scales the capabilities and performance of next-generation mMIMO beamforming at the lowest possible power.”
“Infrastructure vendors face many challenges when developing O-RAN mMIMO radio units, including access to optimized semiconductors,” said Joe Barry, Vice President of Marketing, Systems & Technology in the Communication and Cloud Business Unit at ADI. “The performance and efficiency of this platform make industry-leading technology available to both established and emerging vendors.”
To find out more about the 5G MIMO Radio Unit see the product page at ADI the website listed below.
Analog Devices Inc. | analog.com
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