Written by Andrew Wooden
Operator Vodafone has added to its recent salvo of Open RAN announcements, announcing a collaboration with Arm for a new chipset based on open architecture.
New platforms loaded with Arm-based processors optimised for use in Open RAN base stations will be developed with enough compute power to support advanced 5G services and provide advances in energy efficiency, claims the announcement.
Vodafone proclaims that through the collaboration with Arm it is committed to enabling the competitive landscape for Open RAN chipsets and the associated ecosystem by providing smaller companies with the necessary testing and verification support to get involved in using them. This move also has significant competitive implications for Intel in the telecoms context.
In terms of actually producing the chipsets, specialist system and silicon firms SynaXG and Ampere Computing have been drafted in to test and validate the Arm-based Open RAN silicon, while Fujitsu will provide the RAN software.
Testing of the chipsets will begin this year in vendors’ laboratories to nail down the compute platform and silicon integration, and the plan is in Q1 2024 it will be sent to Vodafone’s test facilities at its R&D centre in Málaga, as well as its Newbury base in the UK.
The fruits of this collaboration will be made available to the entire industry, ‘transforming networks from pure communications systems into disaggregated and open platforms for innovation,’ claims the release.
