Marvell baseband processors advance 5G networks

Marvell Technology, Inc. has launched its next generation OCTEON 10 Fusion family of baseband processors for 5G base stations, which is the industry’s first in 5-nm process technology. The company is showcasing the OCTEON 10 Fusion wireless processors and other 5G RAN, transport and core network devices at Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2023.

Marvell at MWC 2023 (Source: Pablo Valerio)

Offering enhanced 5G feature support, energy efficiency and performance, including twice the system capacity as the previous generation, the new family of wireless processors built on the OCTEON 10 platform includes comprehensive inline Layer 1 hardware accelerators that bring Marvell’s  5G networks into open, virtualized radio access networks (vRAN), said the company.

The OCTEON 10 Fusion processors are optimized for both high-performance and energy efficiency to meet the requirements of 5G applications. Key features include Arm Neoverse N2 CPU cores, a series of programmable DSP cores, and a range of hardware accelerators for 5G baseband, networking and security. One of the new hardware accelerators is an integrated inline AI/ML engine for edge inferencing in RAN applications such as AI-enhanced massive MIMO beamforming.

Marvell partners leading cloud orchestration and management software providers to validate and pre-integrate these platforms for vRAN systems powered by OCTEON 10 Fusion processors. This simplifies the deployment and management of 5G networks for Marvell’s customers and accelerates time-to-market for carriers, said the company.

The OCTEON 10 Fusion design comes with advanced power management that is said to deliver best-in-class RAN performance per watt across a wide range of 5G use cases. These include distributed and radio unit applications, wide bandwidth massive MIMO beamforming to 64T64R and beyond, conventional and virtualized RAN architectures, and Open RAN with support for all L1 split options. The OCTEON 10 Fusion 5G baseband processors are in production.

Marvell also announced a collaboration with Analog Devices, Inc. (ADI), delivering their next-generation 5G massive MIMO (mMIMO) reference design platform with support for Open RAN. The reference design leverages ADI’s latest RadioVerse transceiver SoC (ADRV9040) with the OCTEON 10 Fusion 5G baseband processor, improving time to market for advanced mMIMO radio units and O-RAN support with up to 40% lower energy consumption compared with the previous generation, together with a smaller size and lower weight, according to the companies.

The reference design supports 32 transmit and receive antennas (32T32R) with 400 MHz of operational bandwidth and 300 MHz of instantaneous bandwidth and it is expandable to 64T64R. The OCTEON 10 Fusion 5G baseband processor and RadioVerse SoC leverage hardware accelerators and RF and digital baseband process nodes shipping commercially, 16 nm and 5 nm, respectively. The platform enables Network Energy Savings (NES) modes for additional power savings.

In addition to the OCETON 10 Fusion 5G baseband, other Marvell 5G solutions highlighted at MWC include DSP-powered 50G to 400G modules for fronthaul to metro transport, Prestera-powered high-performance carrier switches for disaggregated cell site gateways and LiquidSecurity 2 hardware security module for cloud post-quantum 5G data protection. Marvell’s vRAN collaborations also will be showcased at Nokia’s and Samsung Networks’ booths. In addition, Arm, Dell, Nokia, VMware and Vodaphone will display 5G vRAN accelerators powered by Marvell’s new OCTEON 10 Fusion processors.