Vodafone added India’s Saankhya Labs to its growing list of partners tackling the complex open radio access network (RAN) silicon development market.

Saankhya Labs is a fabless semiconductor firm that develops and designs semiconductor reference architectures used by actual chipmakers like Intel, Samsung, and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC). Other fabless firms include AMD, Apple, Nvidia, and Qualcomm.

Saankhya Labs’ work with Vodafone is around defining an open RAN chip architecture that can support any open software to connect the required hardware pieces, hopefully at a lower cost than proprietary solutions. Vodafone labels these chips as “accelerators,” explaining “these chips are critical in being able to apply” massive multiple-input, multiple-output (MIMO) antenna technology to open RAN, “giving it the capacity to support thousands of users from a single mast.”

“The development of fully programmable, open hardware and the standardization of the layer-1 interface – the physical infrastructure that transports customer data as electrical signals – are key to drive greater interoperability within the open RAN ecosystem,” Vodafone explained. “A more modular system will allow operators to respond quickly to customer demand for more capacity and new services.”

The work builds on Vodafone’s launch earlier this year of a facility in Malaga, Spain, focused on designing and developing open RAN silicon. The facility will be staffed with 50 open RAN research and development specialists, joining 650 software engineers, architects, and technicians. A number of vendors have joined that work, including Arm, Broadcom, Dell Technologies, Intel, Qualcomm, and Xilinx.

Vodafone 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 (AI).

The carrier has committed to having 30% of its European network running on open RAN by 2030.

Vodafone CEO to Leave

The news also comes on the heels of Vodafone’s long-time CEO Nick Read announcing he will step down from that position at the end of the year. Vodafone’s board appointed CFO Margherita Della Valle as interim CEO as it looks for a new leader.

Read replaced Vittorio Colao as Vodafone’s CEO in late 2018, having previously served as CFO. Della Valle at that time assumed the CFO position.