Dr. Chih-Lin I, Technical Steering Committee (TSC) Co-Chair of the O-RAN Alliance: “I am pleased that RF DSP is building white-box hardware in support of O-RAN’s vision. The features of modularity, scalability, hot-swapability, remote-programmability, and support of 100MHz to 400MHz 5G NR bandwidth with contiguous carrier aggregation are important requirements for 5G hardware developing platform. It can accelerate the development of the white-box base station hardware. Also the proffer of FPGA codes and IP is very important for the feasibility of the software function of 5G white-box base station.”
Farhad Shafai, vice president, Communications Markets, Xilinx.: “The 5G infrastructure market is driving innovation and we are pleased that RF DSP has selected our market-leading Virtex UltraScale+ device as the main 5G engine of its platform to provide the massive DSP power and compute needed in its 5G white-box hardware platform. The full-mesh backplane which interconnects up to 24 UltraScale+ Virtex FPGAs shines the spotlight on the superior high-speed SERDES technology and DSP power in our UltraScale+ family.”
The current platform uses industry-standard ATCA chassis an 100Gb full-mesh backplane that offers many technical advantages for system development and testing that can be made available now, including a wide selection of computing blades and storage blades. RF DSP supports the customization of the hardware platform to other form factors for field deployment.
By selecting the type and number of blades, the White-Box 5G Hardware platform can be configured as DU+RU, DU+RU+MEC, or low PHY split O-RAN O-RU. RF DSP will also provide FPGA codes, IP and design services to implement O-RAN open Front Haul interface (with e.g. eCPRI/RoE encapsulation), FFT/IFFT, PRACH filtering, MU-MIMO channel estimation and digital beamforming, MIMO calibration and antenna phase alignment. With a single MIMO RU blade and a single general-purpose computing blade, the system provides a 5G NR small cell that can be configured as a single sector of 16T16R, two sectors of 8T8R, four sectors of 4T4R or other field-configurable MIMO options. With 8 MIMO RU blades and a number of general-purpose computing blades, the system provides a 128T128R massive MIMO 5G macro cell gNB. In all cases, built-in calibration circuits and algorithms support phase alignment of all RF ports that is necessary for enhanced MU-MIMO performance of MIMO. The platform has a built-in GPS and can accept external 1pps and radio frame clock, minimizes end-to-end jitter and phase noise variation among RF ports. It also provides a digital interface to control RF frontend and calibration of MIMO antenna arrays.
