Step Towards A 5G Software-Defined RAN Over A Fully Open-Source Parallel RISC-V Architecture (ETH Zurich)


A technical paper titled "Efficient Parallelization of 5G-PUSCH on a Scalable RISC-V Many-core Processor" was published by researchers at ETH Zurich. Abstract (partial) "5G Radio access network disaggregation and softwarization pose challenges in terms of computational performance to the processing units. At the physical layer level, the baseband processing computational effort is typicall... » read more

Massive IoT Interop Fuels Protocol Battle


Wireless standards are plentiful, but most are not capable of being scaled to the level of a smart city. As a result, such networks have been built application-by-application using proprietary stacks, often with non-interoperable network layers. That, in turn, has slowed the proliferation of dense wireless connectivity at scale. “In a hyper-connected world, connectivity choices are driv... » read more

What’s After 5G


This year’s IEEE Symposia on VLSI Technology and Circuits (VLSI 2020) included a presentation by NTT Docomo that looked far into the future of cellular communications, setting the stage for a broad industry shift in communication. This is far from trivial. 5G only just recently entered the commercial world, and — especially with the higher millimeter-wave (mmWave) frequencies — it has ... » read more

Lessons Learned In 4G LTE


By Ann Steffora Mutschler While 4G LTE has moved into the mainstream, there are lessons to be learned about these very complex modems, especially from the perspective of balancing power and performance. The road to mainstream wasn’t exactly smooth sailing. “4G LTE initially got a bad rap for battery life, for power consumption,” said Pete Hardee, low-power design solution marketin... » read more