Chipmaker Xilinx today announced a new PCIe card designed for distributed and virtual baseband units (vBBUs) in 5G open radio access networks (RAN). 

“We’re taking the chips that we already deploy in BBUs today and sticking them on PCI express cards” with processor acceleration, said Mike Wissolik, director of wired and wireless product marketing at Xilinx. The card can be installed into a commodity x86 server used in an open RAN environment.

The T1 Telco Accelerator Card for open RAN marks an entirely new product line for Xilinx, and it was driven by network operators that started pushing the chipmaker to embrace virtualization about a year ago, according to Wissolik. 

“Our traditional pitch is we’re selling chips and [intellectual property] to the big dogs, the OEMs that make this gear,” he said. “In the case of this open RAN stuff, it’s actually the operator is pulling that gear apart, seeing a bunch of Xilinx chips, and approaching us in the mid-to-late 2019 timeframe” with questions about the company’s plans for virtualization.

“We were kind of pulled into this by the operators who have a desire to assemble their own stuff so they can move away from the proprietary vendor lock issues that they have with the big OEMs and standardize more of an open compute model,” Wissolik said. 

Operators frame this as an opportunity to deliver software services at the edge, charge for it, and increase their revenue stream “to pay for all this crazy expensive 5G gear,” he said. 

Dimitris Mavrakis, senior research director at ABI Research, called the product a “major breakthrough and significant milestone in the evolution of open RAN.” 

By handling traffic to and from multiple radio units, functions typically delivered on specialized radios from incumbent vendors, the Xilinx T1 Telco Accelerator Card is providing operators another path to open processing architectures augmented by dedicated accelerators, Mavrakis explained. 

The card will also “simplify the complexity of open RAN equipment and accelerate its implementation across multiple deployment scenarios,” he said in a statement. “It is the first of many expected industry announcements that will create the foundation for smaller companies as well as the big players to innovate. Xilinx now has a first-mover advantage that will likely result in major business growth for the company and will surely help in accelerating the creation of the new open RAN ecosystem.”

Innovation in the semiconductor space, particularly the chips that will power open RAN radios, is often cited as one of many unresolved challenges, according to some of open RAN’s biggest players. 

“Everyone wants to forget the radios, and the radios are what makes wireless wireless. Open RAN is great, but tell me how we’re going to have the world’s best Open RAN radios. That’s what I want to hear people talking about,” Parallel Wireless CEO Steve Papa told SDxCentral earlier this year. “There’s too much attention to things like virtualization right now. I could have the best virtualized software in the world, but if I don’t have access to the best radios it’s all for naught.”

Analyst predictions on open RAN are rising, but wide discrepancies remain. ABI Research expects the market to be worth $37.5 billion, capturing about 22% of the total public RAN market by 2025. Dell’Oro Group earlier this month said open RAN hardware and software will near 10% of the total RAN market and surpass $5 billion in cumulative revenue during the next five years.

Xilinx said it is already shipping the T1 Telco Accelerator Card to customers worldwide and it expects volume production to be achieved by early 2021.