Qualcomm doubled down on its radio access network (RAN) aspirations at MWC Barcelona 2022 this week announcing a wave of open RAN equipment adoption alongside a new fully-integrated open RAN platform built in collaboration with Fujitsu.

The latter integrates 5G millimeter-wave (mmWave) distributed unit (DU) and radio units (RU) in a bid to improve performance and power efficiency while reducing the cost of operating virtualized open RAN infrastructure.

Qualcomm and its partners claim the consolidated 5G modules are critical to enabling a new generation of high-performance mmWave applications.

“We anticipate this joint collaboration will allow us to launch breakthrough technology for enabling full-package mmWave DU and RU solutions,” Masaki Taniguchi, SVP of Fujitsu's mobile system business unit, said in a statement.

Under the arrangement, Fujitsu — operating within NTT DoCoMo's 5G open RAN ecosystem initiative — will support the deployment of the consolidated DU-RU modules.

Alongside Qualcomm's Fujitsu collaboration, the vendor's open RAN equipment continues to garner interest from carriers and communications equipment vendors alike. Ahead of this week's MWC 2022 event in Barcelona, Spain, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Rakuten Symphony, and Mavenir said they were working with Qualcomm to accelerate open RAN development.

All of these collabs share a common element: Qualcomm's 5G RAN DU accelerator cards.

Announced last summer at MWC 2021, Qualcomm's X100 5G accelerators integrate with commercial, off-the-shelf servers over a PCIe interface, and support concurrent sub-6 GHz and mmWave networks.

The cards work by offloading latency-sensitive, compute-intensive 5G baseband functions, like demodulation, beam forming, channel coding, and massive MIMO, from the CPU, which reduces the number of cores required and corresponding power and footprint needed to support open RAN networks. The accelerators are a key part of Qualcomm's return to the RAN market, which will see the vendor supply 5G open RAN small cells, DU accelerator cards, and a series of system-on-a-chip (SoC)-based products.

“Not only do we have solutions for the small cells, but we have solutions for the large capacity radio units. And we have an inline accelerator card that plugs directly into a data center," Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon said during an investor event last November. "Cellular infrastructure is changing, it’s changing fundamentally because the RAN is getting virtualized."

HPE plans to use Qualcomm's 5G accelerators to support its entry into the virtual and open RAN arena with what it describes as the "first fully optimized virtual DU."

The virtualized distribution units are powered by Qualcomm's X100 5G RAN accelerator cards running in HPE's low-profile ProLiant DL110 Telco servers, and boast greater power-efficiency and higher performance compared to existing 5G infrastructure, according to Qualcomm. The combination, the company claims, enables a single rack-unit server to support dense 5G mid-band and massive MIMO deployments, while also achieving a 60% lower cost of ownership.

Meanwhile, Rakuten Symphony and Mavenir independently announced plans last week to deploy a combination of Qualcomm's X100 5G RAN accelerators and the company's radio unit platform to support 64 transmit, 64 receive massive MIMO antenna deployments. According to Qualcomm, these capabilities will dramatically improve data speeds, coverage, and increase overall network capacity.

Announced in late 2020, the Qualcomm's Radio Unit (QRU) platform encompasses a series of ASICs designed to accelerate low-level physical-layer and radio frequency transceivers associated with cellular antennas, including massive MIMO arrays.

The trio are far from the first companies the throw their weight behind Qualcomm's RAN vision.

Since vowing to break into the 5G RAN chipset market in late 2020, Qualcomm has announced partnerships with several leading carriers and communications equipment providers, including Deutsche Telekom, NTT DoCoMo, Vodafone, and NEC.

While Qualcomm — a major supplier of cellular modems — is no stranger to 5G small cell chipsets used in mmWave RAN infrastructure, the chipmaker has only recently added support for macro and micro cellular sites and sub-6 GHz spectrum.