Introduction

Qualcomm an US based semiconductor chipset company introduced  Accelerator Card X100 for 5G RAN applications. X100 Accelerator Card is designed to deliver a high-performance, low-latency, power-efficient, and customizable turnkey solution for 5G RAN ease of deployment, and to accelerate operator and infrastructure vendor adoption of virtualized RAN  (vRAN) platforms.

The solution is a PCIe inline accelerator card that can be seamlessly plug into standard COTS servers to offload CPUs from latency sensitive and compute-intensive 5G baseband L1/Physical Layer functions, such as demodulation, beamforming, channel coding, and Massive MIMO computation needed for high-capacity deployments.

It can be used for both public and private networks. Its aims to give carriers the ability to increase overall network capacity and fully realize the transformative potential of 5G.

Qualcomm X100 Key Features

• It is an inline accelerator card for 5G RAN Applications
• Accelerator Card is an O-RAN compliant solution, supporting a range of baseband function split options—including all 7.x split functions
• It has Integrated beamforming processing
• Supports 3 sector Massive MIMO 64T64R  [100MHz with 70% traffic load]
• The solution provides OEMs and operators with deployment flexibility and facilitates scalable and cost-effective 5G RAN network spanning mmWave and sub-6 GHz.
• Upgradable architecture of L1 software to enable rapid rollout of future 3GPP release features, extend platform lifespan
• It is expected to enable cloud-native and virtualized 5G network deployments by offloading server CPUs from compute-intensive 5G baseband processing, resulting in increased performance and lower TCO by reducing power consumption and the no. of CPUs and cores required by up to 50%.

Technical Specifications

• Architecture
  • Inline Accelerator independent of CPU Function
• L1 High Inline Acceleration Layers
  • Up to 16DL/ 8UL per CC
• O-RAN
  • Support all 7.x split functions
• PCIe Interface and Card Type
  • X16 lane Gen 4
  • FHHL
• Fronthaul Interface
  • Integrated 300Gbps Ethernet
  • 3x QSFPs, eCPRI
• Clock Interface
  • GNSS RF Input or 10MHz/PP1S Input
• Thermal Cooling
  • Passive
• Memory
  • 8GB LPDDR5 at 3.2GHz
• Max Power
  • 35W  with fully load
• Software
  • Commercial and Customizable L1 SW

Reference

• Qualcomm X100 5G RAN Accelerator Card Product Document

Related Post

• O-RAN Fronthaul Spilt Option 7-2x