Accton and Picocom partner on 5G Open RAN radio products

Picocom, the 5G Open RAN baseband semiconductor and software specialist, has announced in conjunction with Accton Technology Group (Accton), a provider of networking and communications solutions, that they have entered into a partnership for upcoming 5G Open RAN products. 

Picocom silicon and software will power Accton's new 5G Open RAN radio units (O-RUs), and Accton will bring Picocom's ORANIC in-line PHY/NIC distributed unit (O-DU) card to the mass market.

"As a leader in the wireless industry, it is paramount that we seek out and partner with the best technology providers available. As a result, Picocom has emerged as the 5G Open RAN PHY provider of choice. Accton has been closely monitoring and working with Picocom for some time - we are pleased to be able to go public with our multi-layered partnership," says Mingshou Liu, President of Accton Technology China. "We are delighted to be working with Picocom and look forward to a fruitful partnership."

"We are honoured to be working in partnership with Accton. It is a privilege to have such a renowned ODM company bring our award-winning in-line PHY/NIC card to market," says Peter Claydon, President of Picocom. 

"Accton will not only help realise ORANIC into the fully-featured product that the industry needs and wants, but we'll also see PC802 devices and our 5G NR O-RU software at the heart of future Accton O-RU products."

PC802 is shipping in mass production quantities together with mature software for Open RAN Distributed Units (O-DU) and Radio Units (O-RU), as well as integrated small cells. In addition, PC802 supports both 4G LTE and 5G NR.

The PC802 'ORANIC' is a Small Cell Forum (SCF) award-winning Open RAN in-line PHY and NIC board, designed for 5G O-RAN O-DU servers. ORANIC interfaces to L2 software via the Open RAN SCF FAPI interface. It includes 4 PC802s, driving 4 25G SFPs. O-RAN Open Fronthaul interface processing is integrated directly into PC802. ORANIC is capable of driving 16 2T2R or 8 4T4R O-RUs.

The PC802 is a purpose-designed PHY SoC for 5GNR/LTE small cell disaggregated and integrated RAN architectures and includes support for industry-leading Open RAN specifications. The SoC interfaces with a layer 2/3 stack via the SCF FAPI interface over PCIe. The PC802 supports seamless interfacing to Radio Units (O-RU) via the O-RAN Open Fronthaul eCPRI interface or directly to RFICs with a standardised JESD204B high-speed serial interface.

The PC802 supports 3GPP 5GNR releases 15 and 16, with flexibility for future releases.

At the highest level, the PC802 device's function in a small cell use case is seen as transforming FAPI messages from the L2/3 into IQ samples for the radio and vice versa. In addition, it includes driving the external physical and software interfaces, PHY processing and Digital Front End (DFE) functions.

The PC802 is also optimised to provide upper PHY processing in an O-RAN Alliance O-DU, by transforming the FAPI messages from the L2/3 into frequency domain IQ samples using eCPRI and Open fronthaul messages, which can be transmitted over the Ethernet to O-RU remote radio units.