Marvell is joining the open RAN movement with a new range of 5G products. The O-RAN platform consists of silicon, software and hardware reference designs spanning the radio unit, distributed unit and centralized unit, with Ethernet connectivity between these network elements. In addition, the company presented a new range of carrier Ethernet products to support 5G and 400G metro network deployments.
The mMIMO RU is a 32T32R, eight DL layer, 100MHz channel radio unit. The hardware reference design was developed in partnership with Analog Devices and comes with beamforming and management plane software as well as a fronthaul interface based on O-RAN specifications.
The 5G massive MIMO RUs will incorporate Analog Device's next-generation transceiver technology, including an advanced, programmable digital front-end. Marvell is providing its baseband silicon, which offers beamforming and a lower L1 software supporting O-RAN split 7.2. The products come with system-level hardware reference designs developed in collaboration with Benetel, and initial prototypes are expected in the second half of 2021.
Marvell's Octeon Fusion-O DU hardware reference designs are available as either a virtualized DU (vDU) PCIe-based offload accelerator or an integrated DU. They support dual-mode LTE and 5G and come with integrated fronthaul for a 7.2 split and 16DL/8UL layer support.
In addition to vDU server configurations, the Marvell O-RAN platform also provides support for its L2/L3 Octeon processors supporting a fully integrated standalone CU implementation. It worked with industry leaders to ensure partnership protocol stack ports.
Marvell's O-RAN platform development kits will be available in Q1 2021.
To complement the portfolio, Marvell also introduced its latest generation of carrier Ethernet switches, the Prestera DX 7300. The products were developed for the demands of 5G carrier and 400GE metro optical networks, offering low power usage with a small footprint. To support the new RAN deployment models for radio access fronthaul applications, the Prestera DX 7300 family integrates highly accurate time synchronization, 802.1CM Time-Sensitive-Network for fronthaul, network slicing and native eCPRI-aware processing.
In addition, the new switches integrate 56Gbps SerDes, high-capacity MACsec and advanced processing that can be matched with pluggable 400G-ZR optical modules. This functionality will help system manufacturers to develop multi-access edge computing and data centre interconnect applications, the company said.
Available now, the Prestera DX 7300 devices are Marvell's third generation of carrier Ethernet switch products, with tens of millions of ports shipped to date to over 100 customers. The portfolio is comprised of three Ethernet switches that scale port speeds from 1Gbps to 400Gbps with bandwidth ranging from 300Gbps to 1.6Tbps.
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