Semiconductor company Marvell Technology Group joined the Telecom Infra Project (TIP)’s Evenstar programme to develop 4G and 5G distributed unit (DU) equipment for open RAN.
The company said it will contribute a DU reference design based on its Fusion-B baseband processors, capable of delivering data rates of up to 10Gb/s downlink and 5Gb/s uplink. It will work with Facebook and other Evenstar participants to enable third-party protocol stack software to run on its chips.
Marvell added the aim is to begin operator trials of Evenstar DU equipment in 2022.
The move is Marvell’s latest in the open RAN market: it deployed a platform compatible with the approach in December 2020.
EVP of Marvell’s processor business group, Raj Singh stated the company realised “the key to success, not just for our platform but for the industry as a whole, involves collaboration” efforts like Evenstar.
The Evenstar programme launched in February 2020 to create an ecosystem of open RAN kit, initially targeting development of remote radio units (RRU) before starting work on DU kit in October 2020.
