Xilinx launches T1 Telco Accelerator Card in Korea 

Xilinx is aiming to expand into 5G network virtualization band market of South Korea.

The company unveiled its T1 Telco Accelerator Card via an online conference on Wednesday for the South Korean market.

T1 is a micro accelerator card for O-RAN distributed unit (O-DU) and virtual baseband unit (vBBU). It is used for open networks.

Carriers are fast-investing in 5G virtualization, Xilinx said. Telcos are investing in 5G Open-RAN models to introduce software services on the edge level, the company said. The company’s T1 was launched to meet this demand.

T1 supports O-RAN fronthaul protocol and layer 1 offload. It can takeover for tasks that CPU find difficult to process. Coding features of the main channels can be offloaded from the CPU to the T1 card. This will increase in-coding process amount by up to 45 times compared to the same server. De-coding amount increases by up to 23 times. 

Less CPU is used that will save cost and power consumption from the use of the cards, the company said.

O-RAN fronthaul termination supports 50Gbps optical port. It can process various 5G NR 4TRX sectors of the 100MHz OBW. T1’s fronthaul and layer 1 bandwith is easily expandable. If customers want more power, they can just add more cards.

Xilinx unveiled a reference design applied to O-RAN fronthaul and 5G NR layer 1 so that telcos can reduce development time. The company will also provide turnkey solution and software support for ecosystem partners.

T1 supply began for some customers starting in July. Dell EMC R40 server was the best known product. Four to five other companies besides Dell were also using T1, Xilinx said.

TI will began mass production in early 2021.