Marvell Technology @ Mobile World Congress 2023

Marvell Technology will showcase its latest semiconductor solutions and presents details about its partnerships at – the Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2023 in Barcelona.
Marvell chip makerMarvell Technology launched its next generation OCTEON 10 Fusion baseband processors for 5G base stations—the industry’s first in 5nm process technology.

Marvell OCTEON 10 wireless processors offer enhanced 5G feature support, energy efficiency and performance, including twice the system capacity as the previous generation. The OCTEON Fusion processors power networks that connect more than half of the world’s mobile subscribers.

This innovative platform, adopted by major OEMs, also includes comprehensive inline Layer 1 hardware accelerators that bring Marvell’s proven performance of established 5G networks into open, virtualized Radio Access Networks (vRAN).

The OCTEON 10 Fusion processors are optimized for both high-performance and energy efficiency to address the growing demands of 5G applications. The product family features Arm Neoverse  N2 CPU cores, a series of programmable DSP cores, and a range of hardware accelerators for 5G baseband, networking and security. An integrated inline AI/ML engine enables efficient edge inferencing for RAN applications such as AI-enhanced massive MIMO beamforming.

“In collaboration with Marvell, we are providing operators with outstanding 5G performance and power efficiency for both existing and open vRAN architectures,” said June Moon, Executive Vice President and Head of R&D, Networks Business at Samsung Electronics.

“Marvell’s 5nm OCTEON 10 Fusion processors extend the performance and features of the Dell 5G Open RAN accelerator card to enable carrier-grade RAN virtualization,” Andrew Vaz, Vice President, Product Management, Dell Technologies Telecom Systems Business, said. “We work with Marvell to deliver 5G capabilities to operators and cloud service providers on Dell PowerEdge or any other x86 server.”

“As carriers deploy more complex radio features to enhance 5G coverage and capacity, optimized silicon with hardware acceleration and 5nm technology are critical to scale system performance, power, and cost efficiency,” said Raghib Hussain, President of Products and Technologies at Marvell.

“Mobile operators need to scale their networks to meet consumer demand for more bandwidth and emerging opportunities like fixed wireless access. At the same time, they must remain within tight cost and energy envelopes,” said Prakash Sangam, Founder of Tantra Analyst. “Processors optimized for specific 5G functions like Marvell’s OCTEON 10 Fusion, provide the performance and headroom needed for today and future networks.”

Marvell is working with the leading cloud orchestration and management software providers to validate and pre-integrate these platforms for vRAN systems powered by OCTEON 10 Fusion processors. This will simplify the deployment and management of 5G networks for Marvell’s customers and accelerate time-to-market for carriers.

“The validation of Red Hat OpenShift on Marvell’s new OCTEON 10 Fusion Open RAN accelerator enables best-in-class 5G RAN virtualization for cloud orchestration and management software allowing service providers to scale into the future,” said Honore LaBourdette, Vice President, Telco, Media, Entertainment & Edge Ecosystem, Red Hat.

“Our collaboration will further help operators deploy and simplify the introduction of new services and efficiently manage a physically distributed, cloud native vRAN infrastructure with performance that matches existing 5G networks based on Marvell’s inline acceleration technology,” said Avijit Sinha, Chief Product Officer, Wind River.

“Combination of Marvell’s OCTEON 10 Fusion with VMware Telco Cloud Platform RAN provides CSPs a common foundation for deploying 5G in a multi-cloud environment and scalability that optimizes the revenue and efficiency of each RAN site,” said Lakshmi Mandyam, Vice President of service provider product management and partner ecosystem at VMware.

Analog Devices

Analog Devices and Marvell Technology announced their 5G massive MIMO (mMIMO) reference design platform with support for Open RAN. The combination of ADI’s latest RadioVerse Transceiver SoC and the Marvell OCTEON 10 Fusion 5G baseband processor, improves the time-to-market for mMIMO radio units and O-RAN support with up to 40 percent lower energy consumption.

The OCTEON 10 Fusion baseband processor also provides flexible L1 implementation, with hardware and software reuse across the RU (Radio Unit) and DU (Distributed Unit) to facilitate evolving L1 splits among operators worldwide over the coming years, while the RadioVerse SoC provides extensive digital RF front end capabilities including field proven DPD.

“As mMIMO radio functionality grows in complexity, more specialized silicon approaches are required,” said Alex Jinsung Choi, Chairman of the O-RAN ALLIANCE. “Reference designs like the one created by ADI and Marvell help catalyze the O-RAN market for 5G mMIMO radio units by enabling advanced configurations that meet network operators’ high expectations for power efficiency and performance.”

RadioVerse Transceiver SoC and the OCTEON 10 Fusion processor support the entire signal chain with unmatched RU system efficiency. The ADRV9040 RadioVerse Transceiver SoC includes substantial digital capabilities including linearization algorithms for boosting power amplifier efficiency and performance, as well as digital channel filters which reduce interface rates.

“Infrastructure vendors face many challenges when developing O-RAN mMIMO radio units, including access to optimized semiconductors,” said Joe Barry, Vice President of Marketing, Systems & Technology in the Communication and Cloud Business Unit at ADI. “The performance and efficiency of this platform makes industry-leading technology available to both established and emerging vendors.”

“The combination of Marvell’s OCTEON 10 Fusion 5G baseband processor and ADI’s RF transceiver technology provides OEMs a 5G Open Radio Unit reference design that scales the capabilities and performance of next-generation mMIMO beamforming at the lowest possible power,” said Will Chu, Senior Vice President, Processors Business Group at Marvell.