San Jose-based Xilinx, a leading provider of All Programmable FPGAs, SoCs, and 3D ICs, this week announced its collaboration with China Mobile's research unit for the development of virtualized 5G wireless networks. Both the organizations had a special signing ceremony during the 5G Forum at the International Mobile Internet Conference on August 15.
China mobile is expected to leverage on Xilinx's advancement in virtualization technology for the development of the 5G base station. According to Xilinx, as 5G base stations will employ a large number of antennas with multiple radio access technologies, network function virtualization (NFV) becomes a requirement for 5G, with hardware being abstracted and resources allocated dynamically for the required wireless functions. In particular, the company said that its innovations in partial reconfiguration (PR) allow equipment designers to create designs that can be altered in-system without interrupting the equipment operation.
"China Mobile has been working on new technologies like large scale antenna systems (LSAS) and cloud RAN virtualization (C-RAN) for several years. The realization of those new technologies requires a new level of flexibility and scalability that only all programmable platforms can offer. I believe the collaboration between China Mobile and Xilinx will accelerate the adoption of the industry's most advanced technologies and therefore help us deliver the highest quality service to Chinese customers in the mobile internet era."
- Bill Huang, general manager of China Mobile Research Institute
"5G wireless network systems will be extremely complex, requiring tremendous signal processing power and high speed connectivity, and the realization of hardware virtualization. This can only be enabled through innovations in silicon, software and IP. Our close collaboration with China Mobile ensures Xilinx's technical innovations are aligned with the needs of the next generation wireless networks."
- Sunil Kar, vice president of Wireless Communications at Xilinx
