5G Infrastructure

5G network technology is driving connectivity for next-generation applications. The new innovations in the Speedster7t architecture enable developers to quickly respond to the rapidly changing 5G landscape.

5G cellular network technology is driving connectivity for the next generation of application seamlessly with high security and reliability. 5G continues the paradigm of previous cellular standards not only in driving bandwidth, but also extending it to many more devices and usage models. The 5G standard envisions connecting billions of devices, supporting much higher data rates and much lower latencies with seamless transition from existing network infrastructure. Network security, scalability and reliability are imperative requirements to realize the use cases across three presumed 5G infrastructure categories: enhanced mobile broadband, IoT and mission-critical applications.Key trends include:

  • Increased bandwidth for Enhanced Mobile Broadband and other applications, specifically driving the instantaneous available bandwidth to 10x of the current network throughput.
  • Connectivity to many, many more devices, with the advent of cellular connectivity for the Internet of Things (IoT). Expectations are that there will be 50 billion cellular connected devices by 2020.
  • Proliferation of new usage models, exerting new requirements onto mobile devices and the cellular infrastructure that they connect to. Some of the examples are:
    • Low bandwidth, low power requirements for connecting multiple battery-powered IoT end-points for connectivity and monitoring encompassed within mMTC
    • High reliability, low latency cellular for vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure connectivity (C-V2X) to complement existing V2X solutions
    • High reliability, low latency support for new and emerging applications like remote surgery and augmented/virtual-reality
    • Low latency (<1ms) to meet human level response time for robotics and tactile internet applications such as drones and gaming, respectively
  • Emerging need for Edge Analytics and Mobile Edge Compute. Gravity has shifted from the previous assumption of data moving to centralized compute resource for processing, to a new paradigm of the compute resource moving towards where the data is generated. This is being driven by latency requirements of emerging applications and the sheer volume of data and the desire to optimize scarce networking resources.

Speedster7t Solution

The new innovations in Speedster7t devices enable developers to rapidly innovate with new network deployments because the 5G network typologies will require different integration strategies for diverse applications. Similar to the requirements for advanced networking, 5G networks will include high throughput packet processing, traffic management, and data-path security. Speedster7t devices enable high performance packet processing and workload acceleration with a 2D Network on Chip (NOC) and bus routing for efficient data transfers. Furthermore, computationally complex signal processing in radio, baseband and backhaul is well suited to the MLP block which efficiently implements matrix multiplication for real and complex numbers. Finally, a key capability of Speedster7t devices is to take the same design and migrate it to embedded FPGA (or FPGA chiplets), providing cost and power reduction along with design reuse.

 
Speedster7t Graphic
 
Application Requirements Speedster7t Value
High performance packet processing for fronthaul, backhaul, and transport
  • Up to 20 Tbps of NoC bandwidth for high-speed, wide-data transfers
  • Optimized 8-bit bus routing
  • Fully flexible bit-wise routing
  • Fine-grained reprogrammability for programmable packet processing pipeline; parallel packet processing engines to support intensive functions such as DPI
  • Flexible (re-)programmable workload acceleration
Power-efficient signal processing for emerging algorithmic requirements, for example machine learning applied to network optimization, beamforming and digital predistortion
  • Efficient computation for matrix mathematics and complex arithmetic
  • Memory hierarchy well suited for matrix-matrix and matrix-vector multiplication
Need for flexibility to adapt to new interface requirements Fine-grained programmability for adaption to fronthaul interfaces such as CPRI, OBSAI, Radio over Ethernet (RoE), eCPRI, XRAN/ORAN
Cost reduction path and smaller form-factor
  • Cost and power reduction path with Speedcore embedded FPGA (eFPGA) integrated in ASIC SoC. Ability to keep required flexibility in cost reduced options
  • Reduce form-factor and interface power with chiplet (standard or custom) package integrated with ASIC SoC
  Radio Baseband Fronthaul Access/Transport Backhaul Cloud RAN
Highest Performance SerDes
112G multi-standard SR/MR/LR PHY       Yes Yes
Ultra-short reach (USR), extra-short reach (XSR) Yes Yes Yes Yes  
Most Advanced Interface IP
Ethernet - lanes running up to 100G each for 100G or 400G communication     Yes (100G) Yes (100G) Yes
SyncE, IEEE1588, time-sensitive networking (TSN) Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
PCIe Gen5 – up to 32 GHz per lane and 512 Gbps/td>         Yes
DDR4/5 - up to 3,200 MHz, 3DS stacked memory Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
Application-specific interfaces (RoE, eCPRI, CPRI, OBSAI) Yes Yes Yes   Yes
Terabit Speed Routing
Network on chip     Yes    
Bus routing Yes Yes Yes    
Fully flexibility bit-wise routing Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
High-Throughput Processing
Datapath cryptography     Yes Yes Yes
Machine learning processor (MLP)     Yes   Yes
Product and/or Cost Reduction Path
Migration to embedded FPGA in ASIC SoC Yes Yes Yes    
FPGA chiplet integrated in-package Yes Yes Yes Yes