Mavenir and Xilinx announced their partnership to bring 4G/5G O-RAN massive MIMO (mMIMO) solutions to speed up Open RAN deployments.
The first mMIMO 64TRX joint solution is expected to be available in Q4 2021.
Mavenir and Xilinx have completed end-to-end integration of a first-generation mMIMO solution using Open RAN principles.
Held at the Mavenir Lab in Bangalore, India, the integration covered multiple deployment scenarios and was evaluated by six global operators. Mavenir delivered the Virtualized RAN (vRAN) support for mMIMO, including Core Network, CU and DU, with Xilinx providing the Category B O-RAN Radio Unit.
Pardeep Kohli, President and CEO, Mavenir, said: “This is an important milestone in the delivery of open and interoperable interfaces enabling the deployment of mMIMO in high density, high mobile traffic metro areas.”
“With the investment we have done on our wireless radio technology and massive MIMO R&D, we collaborate with Mavenir to bring our collective technology and radio system expertise together that will accelerate the deployment of 5G O-RAN massive MIMO radio solutions,” Liam Madden, executive vice president and general manager, Wired and Wireless Group at Xilinx, said.
These products will leverage Xilinx’s technology platform including RFSoC DFE and Versal AI for advanced beamforming, delivering a fully integrated hardware and software O-RAN compliant mMIMO solution.
5G Open RAN has significant momentum in the market with ABI Research forecasting network vendor spending to reach $10 billion by 2026-27 and then surpass traditional RAN at $30 billion by 2030.
“As Mavenir and Xilinx aim to accelerate O-RAN-based massive MIMO adoption, their solutions will be well-timed to serve this high-growth market with the higher spectral efficiency, performance, power efficiency and cost needed as 5G demand intensifies,” ,” said Dimitris Mavrakis, senior research director of 5G at ABI Research.
Xilinx and Mavenir said they plan to provide the needed chips and software for the open 5G networks to implement the technology. The companies said the technology will be ready for testing in labs later this year. Xilinx is based in San Jose, California, and Mavenir is in Richardson, Texas.
The two companies did not announce any customers for the new product, but said Vodafone Group has named them to a short list of potential vendors.
Mavenir partners with NVIDIA
Mavenir earlier announced the launch of an AI-on-5G Hyper Converged Edge solution working with NVIDIA.
Mavenir has developed this solution, based on NVIDIA’ processor, enabling enterprises and telcos to implement AI-on-5G applications for many promising industry verticals.
Mavenir’s Edge AI solution can be deployed by SPs to enhance their Mobile Edge Cloud offering by providing differentiated services to their enterprise customers and their network service users with enhanced revenue generating services such as gaming.
