With the introduction of the Qualcomm 5G DU X100 Accelerator Card, Qualcomm Technologies has announced the augmentation of its 5G RAN Platforms portfolio. This accelerator card is built in a way that allows infrastructure vendors and operators to take advantage of power-efficient 5G, low latency, and high performance while facilitating the adaptation of the cellular ecosystem to the virtualized radio access network (RAN).
The utility is a PCIe inline accelerator card that features synchronous Sub-6 GHz and mmWave baseband assistance which is built to streamline 5G deployments by providing a pre-integrated solution that makes deployment with 5G NR layer 1 High (L1 High) and O-RAN fronthaul processing easier. The PCIe card is built in a manner that allows it to connect to Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) servers to offload CPUs from compute-intensive and latency-sensitive 5G baseband functions like Massive MIMO computation that is required for deployments of high-capacity, channel coding, beamforming, and demodulation.
Qualcomm's Senior Vice President and General Manager, 5G, Mobile Broadband and Infrastructure, Durga Malladi stated that:
Qualcomm Technologies, with its leadership in 5G, is uniquely positioned to drive the evolution of cellular networks and lead the industry towards 5G virtualized networks. We are working closely with mobile operators, network equipment vendors, standards bodies, and other key stakeholders, to enable the deployment of innovative, high-performance, virtualized, and modular 5G networks at scale.
This inline accelerator card also enables infrastructure vendors to fast-track the commercialization of virtualized infrastructure. It augments deployments of virtualized network operators by mitigating power consumption, decreasing the number of cores and CPUs required, and enhancing performance. Qualcomm Technologies is also joining forces with global operators to augment Virtualized RAN's adoption.
