There one more name to the OEM vendors for O-RAN products and name is Marvell Semiconductors. They announced their 5G O-RAN portfolio with a vRAN platform. Open RAN architectures enable multiple options for RAN components supplier and allows operators to choose, increase the flexibility, reduce the Copex. Open RAN is maturing days by days and now implementations have moved beyond lab trials and greenfield deployments to mainstream mobile and private networks.
Marvell O-RAN Platform Highlights
- Its O-RAN solution consists of silicon (chip), software and hardware reference designs inclding the radio unit (RU), distributed unit (DU) and centralized unit (CU) with Ethernet connectivity between these network elements
- The O-RAN solution is Open Ran Alliance compliance and it will brings established, leading-edge DPU and connectivity technology to the emerging open RAN and vRAN
- Solution will be based on OCTEON Fusion baseband processors and OCTEON multi-core DPUs
- The OCTEON Fusion baseband processor has 15 Gbps capacity and support for 200MHz channelization,
- It will be supporting O-RAN functions such as eCPRI compression/decompression and split 7.2 interfaces with integrated fronthaul
- The platform includes key reference software, allowing OEMs, ODMs and network operators to rapidly bring O-RAN compatible products to market.
- The platform development kits will be available in Q1 2021
Marvell O-RAN Platform Specifications
- mMIMO RU
- A 32T32R, 8 DL layer, 100MHz channel radio unit.
- Hardware reference design in partnership with Analog Devices
- Reference lower L1 and beamforming software
- O-RAN management plane software
- O-RAN fronthaul interface
- Analog Devices Transceivers and DFE software
- vDU and DU : The OCTEON Fusion-O DU hardware reference designs are available as either a virtualized DU (vDU) PCIe based offload accelerator or an integrated DU with following features.
- Dual mode 5G and LTE
- Integrated fronthaul for 7.2 split
- 16DL/8UL layer support
- Reference LTE and 5G L1 software
- Control Unit (CU): In addition to support for vDU server configurations, the Marvell O-RAN platform also provides support for industry-leading L2/L3 OCTEON processors supporting a fully integrated standalone CU implementation.
- Dedicated L2/L3 silicon
- Virtualized L2/L3 support
Reference:
- Marvell Website
Related Post:
- O-RAN Fronthaul Synchronization Configuration
- O-RAN RU Reference Architecture
- O-RU Category A and Category
- O-RU Digital Front Solution (DFE) Solution from Xilinx
- O-RAN Distributed Unit (O-DU) Reference Architecture
