Xilinx, the American chip company, has announced that it has won a deal to supply chips to Samsung's networking equipment. The company's Adaptive Compute Acceleration Platform (ACAP) will be used in the South Korean giant's 5G network infrastructure equipment.
Samsung has been gradually expanding its mobile network infrastructure business over the past few years, and it has already powered 5G networks of various carriers in Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, and the US. The company will use Xilinx's Versal programmable chipset to enable beamforming in its 5G network equipment. Beamforming technology allows the handling of more data than previous generation wireless networks.
Xilinx chips to enable Samsung's 5G equipment to be flexible and scalable
5G networks are quite complicated, and the data speeds and coverage are can vary a lot depending on the type of 5G technology used. A low-band 5G tower (600-700MHz) can span across hundreds of square miles and offer download speeds of anywhere between 30Mbps and 250Mbps. A mid-band 5G tower (2.5/3.5GHz) spans across several square miles and offer speeds between 100Mbps and 900Mbps, while a high-band 5G tower (mmWave/24-39GHz) spans a few city blocks and supports downlink speeds of 1Gbps to 3Gbps.
Xilinx specializes in making programmable chipsets, and they can dynamically adapt to changing computing needs. The company's Versal chipset will provide a flexible and scalable platform to Samsung's 5G networking equipment that can address the requirements of cellular operators across various countries and geographies. Beamforming requires multiple downlink/uplink data streams to work simultaneously for multiple users in the same spectrum, and it needs a lot of power-efficient computing.
The Versal chipset is claimed to offer real-time, low-latency signal processing that is needed for beamforming algorithms. The chips also feature AI cores, a tiled array of vector processors, that are ideal for processing mathematical functions required for high-compute density and advanced connectivity. Xilinx chipsets can be reprogrammed and reconfigured even after the deployment, making them perfect for Samsung's 5G wireless networking equipment.
Xilinx chipsets are also used in base stations made by Ericsson, Nokia, and Huawei. However, following US trade sanctions against Huawei, Xilinx is unable to provide its chips to the Chinese telecommunications firm.
