Samsung’s mid-band 5G radios that pack massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) beamforming capabilities feature a system-on-a-chip (SoC) jointly developed with Marvell. Samsung said its next generation mid-band 5G radios will begin shipping with this SoC before this summer.

“This is a single chip solution and therefore it compresses quite a lot of functionality and algorithms into a single SoC, and it drives down power consumption and it improves the size of the radio,” Alok Shah, VP of networks strategy at Samsung Networks, told SDxCentral.

The companies have been collaborating on SoC development for radio access network (RAN) equipment for at least six years, and other jointly developed silicon is already included in other Samsung 5G RAN products, according to Shah.

“One thing that’s become very clear in our industry is the importance of chips, the importance of silicon when it comes to 5G,” he said. “Samsung has an innate advantage by being an expert in semiconductors ourselves, so we have a level of in-house expertise” and Marvell contributes an “expertise in processors to bring the most effective beamforming chips that we could to market.”

The chipmakers intend to continue collaborating across multiple generations of RAN equipment, and “each party is bringing their own IP and their own expertise in certain domains to bear,” Raj Singh, EVP of Marvell’s Processors Business Group, said.

Indeed, Marvell’s position in the 5G silicon is growing. The company last month landed a deal to provide its baseband processor silicon to Fujitsu for some of its forthcoming 5G RAN equipment. 

Samsung and Marvell have developed and commercialized multiple SoCs, but this is the first for massive MIMO on mid-band 5G networks with improved beamforming performance, Shah said, adding that it’s also the first single chip for a radio. The companies also claim the single-chip format translates to a 70% reduction in power consumption on the radio compared to multi-chip designs or FPGAs.

“When you have that dramatic a reduction in power, the thing that it most affects is the body of the box. You don’t have to disperse so much heat, and that also directly affects what pole it sits on, what the cost of that is, and what the labor cost is to deploy it. It’s secondary, tertiary effects that benefit the capex for the deployment,” Singh said. 

“There are other SoCs that perhaps sit in the baseband unit, that do the modem functionality, this one actually sits within the massive MIMO radio, and it runs all the beamforming algorithms that are so important to get the capacity that operators are looking for,” Shah explained. 

Marvell and Samsung work together on these SoCs at the architecture level, including the proper verification and validation measures. Marvell is then responsible for fabricating the chips at a foundry and supplying them to Samsung for its radios.

The SoCs support other functionalities in massive MIMO radios that can be added via software upgrade, but for now the bulk of the computation is being used for beamforming, Shah explained. 

He declined to confirm if these SoCs will be in the mid-band 5G radios Samsung will be shipping to Verizon this year, but it's likely considering how important the operator has become to Samsung after the South Korean vendor beat out Nokia for a $6.64 billion 5G RAN contract that runs through 2025.

The vendor has already shipped tens of thousands of 5G radios with massive MIMO in South Korea and Japan, but those included previous generation silicon. “Going forward into the rest of this year and next year, we’ll be using this piece of silicon,” Shah said. As such, the new SoC will likely be included in radios Samsung ships to NTT DoCoMo in Japan under a new 5G RAN contract it reached earlier this week with the country's largest mobile network operator. 

Samsung earlier this year made good on its pledge to release a fully virtualized 5G RAN portfolio and noted that Verizon was the first operator to commercially deploy the vRAN gear in its network. 

The computing and performance gains that Samsung can now bring to market in this SoC also benefit or otherwise contribute to Samsung’s vRAN push. “Ultimately, where the network is headed is toward an expertise in silicon and an expertise in software. Those are going to be the pillars of the RAN market in the future,” Shah said. 

“One of the challenges in virtualization is the amount of computation that’s involved at a system level, so we’ve moved to new x86 architectures for that baseband processing in the vRANs we’ve deployed,” he explained. “But there’s a lot of processing that goes into massive MIMO and there are certainly benefits by running that processing at the radio. And in fact, you kind of have to, to do this effectively. So it is an important enabler of advanced vRAN systems."