Qualcomm this week inked a collaborative agreement with Vodafone to bolster its desire to earn a more prominent role in the 5G radio access network (RAN) chipset business. 

The chipmaker said it intends to publish a technical blueprint for vendors by the end of this year to build 5G virtualized and open RAN equipment with a portfolio of silicon that will be available for sampling in the first half of 2022. Trials aren’t expected to occur until the latter half of next year.

Activities with Vodafone will help the chipmaker and global operator develop and address some of the challenges in the open RAN ecosystem, explained Gerardo Giaretta, senior director of product management at Qualcomm.

Vodafone, Deutsche Telekom, Orange, and Telefónica – Europe’s four largest mobile network operators – signed an agreement earlier this year to support the development of open RAN across the continent. The operators described open RAN as “the technology of choice for future mobile networks.”

Many operators and some vRAN software vendors have shared concerns about the lack of high-performance, low-power silicon for open RAN, Giarretta said. “The only high-performance, lower-power silicon solution right now out there are really used by traditional infrastructure vendors and they are not ready to open them up to new vendors of course,” he said.

Qualcomm and Vodafone want to develop this reference design to “lower the barrier for everybody, and for new vendors,” Giaretta said. Additional vendors, including operators, software vendors, and equipment suppliers, will eventually be brought into the fold to extend the reach and deployment scenarios of Qualcomm’s chips in an open RAN environment, he added.

The ultimate goal is to create a reference design that meets the needs of open RAN-compliant equipment in a massive multiple-input, multiple-output (MIMO) radio unit with other components from many different vendors, according to Giaretta.

“There may be some other CPU as part of the distributed unit, so there will be other software partners and hardware partners and silicon partners that we will need to work with in order to build the full solution,” he explained.

Qualcomm claims the reference design for its 5G open RAN silicon will overlap and 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 CPU and server chips to virtualize layer 2 and some parts of layer 1 in the distributed unit (DU) with the aid of hardware accelerators, Giaretta explained. 

“We are not going to touch in any way the layer 2 part and the CPU part, so this is not a CPU play for us. So we’ll definitely be complementing the layer 2 part and the CPU from Intel FlexRAN in that context,” he said.

Qualcomm’s 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, Giaretta explained.

“I can totally see a DU that will have an Intel CPU running layer 2 and a Qualcomm accelerator running layer 1,” he said, adding that Qualcomm is also working with Marvell, Xilinx, Nvidia, and other chipmakers to “define a standardized interface between layer 1 and layer 2 so that can actually work in practice.”