Qualcomm is broadening its 5G radio access network (RAN) chipset business with three platforms that it plans to start shipping to vendors in the first half of 2022. The chipmaker claims its pedigree in the semiconductor market for devices makes it uniquely positioned for the virtualized RAN space.

The full portfolio of system-on-a-chip (SoC) based products will adhere to open RAN standards and universally support 5G on millimeter-wave (mmWave) and sub-6 GHz spectrum “across all key global bands,” according to Qualcomm. 

“These new solutions, built on our modem and [radio frequency] expertise, provide foundational technology for high-performance infrastructure with cutting-edge new features,” Cristiano Amon, president at Qualcomm, said in a statement.

Qualcomm, which already has a chipset business for 5G RAN small cells used by incumbent and upstart RAN infrastructure vendors for mmWave, is now expanding that effort to support macro and micro cellular sites, and sub-6 GHz spectrum. 

The roadmap calls for a trio of SoCs for radio units, distributed units, and distributed radio units. “This means that incumbent infrastructure vendors can complement existing portfolios with new capabilities, and new vendors can participate with [open RAN] compatible solutions,” Amon said. 

The SoCs, ASICs, or GPUs in these radios, to varying degrees, are a nagging challenge in the open RAN environment. This effort by Qualcomm gets right at the heart of what some open RAN vendors like Parallel Wireless cite as the top outstanding challenge for a fully virtualized, open RAN to be realized.

The amount of energy required to power 5G infrastructure is a growing concern for operators, and efforts to decrease energy consumption at the radio level would be a significant development for the industry at large. As more massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antennas are deployed to increase the capacity of each site, with network functions running on commodity servers, the open RAN environment and much larger RAN market are still limited by the energy consumption requirements that rise with that added complexity. 

Qualcomm declined to provide specs relative to the energy efficiency or performance benchmarks of the forthcoming SoCs, but Gerardo Giaretta, senior director of product management at Qualcomm, explained that it’s too soon to get into specs with customer sampling not expected until mid 2022. 

The vendor claims it has improved the energy efficiency and amount of functionality it can squeeze into a SoC because of its long history in cellular technology research and development (R&D). Qualcomm has invested at least $40 billion in R&D since the early 1990s and holds more than 130,000 patents, a source of simmering and sometimes boiling contention in the industry due to licensing costs. 

Qualcomm’s revenue from its device chipset business affords it an R&D budget runway that many other companies can’t match, Giarretta said. 

When asked to scope the competitor outlook in the chipset for 5G open RAN market, he named Marvel, Xilinx, and Broadcom, but there are others. Some of the world’s largest RAN vendors that already use some of Qualcomm’s chips for mmWave are assembling their own efforts to supply 5G radios that employ virtualization and adhere to some open RAN principles.

Samsung and Nokia are the two largest RAN vendors to embrace some layers of open RAN, but neither has fully embraced that with all RAN elements and components, which are traditionally closed protected and proprietary. 

In an apparent nod to that dynamic, Giaretta explained that while the Qualcomm’s SoCs will be open RAN compliant, the RAN vendors and by extension, mobile operators, will determine the extent to which open RAN principles are followed in their respective products and networks. Qualcomm’s SoCs for 5G RAN will support the full range, and allow for those variances, he said. 

“It can really depend on how the network will eventually evolve and how the mobile network operator will actually deploy the network, and which interfaces they will open first," Giaretta said.

Qualcomm is providing a “horizontal [SoC] that other players, infrastructure vendors, incumbent and new entrants can build products upon," he added. “While we call it Qualcomm Radio Unit Platform, there is of course no intention from a Qualcomm perspective to build a full box of a radio unit. We are going to stick to our main DNA and our expertise on providing high-performance, energy-efficient [SoCs] that can enable these network transitions that we are seeing.”

Those network transitions abound, and Qualcomm is also highlighting its integrated support for mmWave and sub-6 GHz spectrum is a key differentiator. “If you look at every single product out there right now and in the foreseeable future, they kind of have sub-6 in one line in the roadmap and [mmWave] in the other line in the roadmap — different part of the website, different product … different people working on it, and so forth," Giaretta said. 

The SoCs include Qualcomm’s 5G Modem-RF System with baseband, transceiver, front-end and antenna panels, and support 5G functional split options between the distributed unit and radio unit, allowing for RAN disaggregation. The chips can power macro base stations with massive MIMO or small cells, according to Qualcomm.

“We are working with many vendors, both incumbent and new vendors, but we are not ready at this stage to name any,” Giaretta said. On the operator front, AT&T, BT, Deutsche Telekom, LG Uplus, NTT DoCoMo, Rakuten Mobile, Reliance Jio, Telecom Italia, Telefónica, Verizon, and Vodafone all applauded Qualcomm's efforts via provided statements. The chips aren’t expected to be in commercialized RAN hardware until late 2022 or 2023.