Vodafone poured more money and muscle into its plan to break the hold network equipment makers have on the infrastructure market with the opening of Europe’s first facility designed to develop silicon for open radio access networks (RAN).

The multinational telecom operator, like most early open RAN proponents, is playing the long game and recognizes that silicon innovation for open architecture will be a critical need in that journey. It intends to design an independent chip architecture for open RAN.

Vodafone’s new facility in Malaga, Spain, will be staffed with 50 open RAN research and development specialists, joining 650 software engineers, architects, and technicians. The company pledged to invest about $250 million in the center through 2027 as it pursues additional development in edge computing, private networks, IoT, 5G applications, and artificial intelligence.

About 20 vendors have joined the open RAN silicon effort, including Arm, Broadcom, Dell Technologies, Intel, Qualcomm, Xilinx, and others.

Many of the chipmakers have overlapping partnerships with Vodafone that predate the opening of the new center. The company inked a collaborative agreement with Qualcomm in April 2021 to help the chipmaker publish a technical blueprint for 5G virtualized and open RAN equipment with a portfolio of silicon slated to be available for sampling in the first half of 2022. 

Although multiple chipmakers are involved in these open RAN development efforts with global operators, it remains to be seen how closely the competitors will actually share resources for the advancement of open RAN silicon. The collaborative spirit will likely end at the point of standardized interfaces because most major chipmakers view open RAN as a wide open opportunity.

Qualcomm, which previously vowed to break into the 5G RAN chipset market in the first half of 2022, claims the reference design for its 5G open RAN silicon will complement Intel’s FlexRAN reference architecture. Intel’s design, the most widely adopted form of this type of effort today, is framed around using x86 CPUs to virtualize layer 2 and some parts of layer 1 in the distributed unit with the aid of hardware accelerators. 

“We are not going to touch in any way the layer 2 part and the CPU part,” Gerardo Giaretta, senior director of product management at Qualcomm, explained in April 2021. “We’ll definitely be complementing the layer 2 part and the CPU from Intel FlexRAN in that context.”

However, Qualcomm’s forthcoming reference design will be an alternative to Intel FlexRAN in cases where high-performance use cases require accelerators that do the entire 5G physical layer processing, acting as an inline accelerator, he added.

Vodafone also positioned the new open RAN silicon effort at the Spanish facility as a push to strengthen Europe’s position in the global RAN silicon market. It, along with Europe’s other largest mobile network operators Deutsche Telekom, Orange, and Telefónica linked up at the beginning of 2021 to call open RAN “the technology of choice for future mobile networks.”

Telefónica CTO Enrique Blanco in late 2020 pledged to transition at least 50% of the operator’s markets to open RAN by 2025, and by late 2021 claimed up to 70% of all radios deployed will ride on open RAN architecture by 2025. Deutsche Telekom subsequently started a live open RAN trial in Berlin in October 2021. 

Meanwhile, Vodafone has cemented itself as the early open RAN leader in Europe, following the deployment of the first active 5G open RAN site in Britain last month. The site is carrying live traffic in Bath, England, and Vodafone plans to expand that effort to an additional 2,500 open RAN sites in the southwest of England and most of Wales by 2027.