- Highly integrated Radio System on Chip (SoC) accelerates the development of Open RAN radio units (O-RUs) with lower size, weight, power, cooling, and cost
CARLSBAD, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- MaxLinear, Inc. (Nasdaq: MXL), a leader in wireless infrastructure silicon solutions, today announced that SOLiD, a leader in cellular in-building mobile coverage, has selected the Sierra single chip Radio SoC for its next generation of Indoor O-RUs. Sierra is a highly integrated SoC optimized for 4G/5G Open Radio Access Network (RAN) radio units (RU).
SOLiD’s Indoor O-RAN RU series is an exciting new product line supporting both NR/LTE/NB-IoT and TDD/FDD. Solid’s O-RAN RUs offer high performance and flexibility in an ultra-compact size and low power consumption footprint enabled by MaxLinear’s Sierra Radio SoC.
Sierra is an innovative Radio SoC that flexibly supports all major RU applications, including traditional macro, massive MIMO, pico, all-in-one small cells, and more. Sierra integrates the following sub-systems into a single chip, providing a complete software-programmable radio signal processing engine for O-RUs:
- RF transceiver supporting up to 8 transmitters, 8 receivers, and 2 feedback receivers
- Digital Front End (DFE), including MaxLIN digital pre-distortion (DPD), crest factor reduction (CFR), and Passive Intermodulation (PIM) cancellation
- Low-PHY baseband processor supporting 5G, 4G, and NB-IoT air interfaces
- O-RAN Alliance Split 7.2x fronthaul interface
“The close collaboration between SOLiD and MaxLinear has dramatically sped up the development of our new 5G O-RUs,” said Vice President Hyun-Chae Kim at SOLiD. “The superior level of system integration and flexibility provided by their Sierra SoC has enabled us to reduce the size and power consumption of our product line, while their technical teams provide us with close support that accelerates our time to market.”
“Sierra is an ultimate integration of MaxLinear’s highest performance RF and system technologies,” said Puneet Sethi, Vice President of MaxLinear’s Wireless Infrastructure BU. “It empowers radio vendors to rapidly and cost effectively develop new platforms with smaller size, lower weight, and higher energy efficiency for Open RAN applications. In this way Sierra is a game-changing innovation that levels the playing field for wireless infrastructure vendors and can dramatically accelerate the global rollout of Open RAN without compromise on network performance or cost.”
The global Open RAN market is growing and is estimated to be worth USD $2.8 billion in 2024 and USD $20.9 billion by 2030, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 39.4% during the forecast period, according to the latest Open RAN Market Report from MarketsandMarkets in August 2024.
About MaxLinear’s Sierra Radio SoC Solution
Sierra’s RF transceiver uses a low-power wide-band Zero-IF (ZIF) architecture and supports 8 transmitters (TX) and 8 receivers (RX) with 2 feedback receivers (FBRX). Each RX supports wide signal bandwidths up to 400MHz and each TX and FBRX supports signal bandwidths up to 900MHz. It can operate in 8T8R single-band or 2 x 4T4R multi-band configurations.
The DFE integrates DPD, CFR, PIM cancellation, digital up conversion (DUC), and digital down conversion (DDC) blocks. MaxLinear's proprietary DPD/CFR technology, MaxLIN™, linearizes power amplifiers (PA) up to 400MHz of occupied bandwidth and dramatically improves PA energy efficiency while meeting spectral emission masks with margin. The PIMC block cancels passive intermodulation products in the uplink paths to improve receiver sensitivity and relax the specification of expensive RF filters. The DUC/DDC supports up to eight component carriers per transmit and receive path.
The Low-PHY baseband processor supports 4G, 5G, and NB-IoT air interfaces, including uplink PRACH processing. It can process up to eight component carriers (CC) per transmit and receive path and it is software configurable for different modes and parameters including dynamic spectrum sharing (DSS), bandwidth parts, mixed numerology, and windowing.
Sierra supports an O-RAN fronthaul Split Option 7.2x Category A interface with up to four 10 or 25Gbit/s Ethernet interfaces.
Sierra integrates an embedded CPU for system control. The CPU is an integrated quad-core Arm® A53 processor with Neon™ extensions. Each Arm® core has 1MB of internal SRAM and has access to an additional 8GB of external DRAM through a DDR controller.
For more information on the Sierra RF Radio SoC or MaxLIN DPD linearization technology, visit:
SOLiD’s latest indoor radio unit, powered by Sierra, will be on display in MaxLinear’s meeting room 2L8MR during the MWC 2025 trade show in the Fira Gran Via, Barcelona from Monday, March 3 to Thursday, March 6.
About MaxLinear, Inc.
MaxLinear, Inc. (Nasdaq: MXL) is a leading provider of radio frequency (RF), analog, digital, and mixed-signal integrated circuits for access and connectivity, wired and wireless infrastructure, and industrial and multimarket applications. MaxLinear is headquartered in Carlsbad, California. For more information, please visit https://www.maxlinear.com/.
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About SOLiD
SOLiD enables indoor and outdoor cellular at many of the world's best-known and most challenging venues — from the busiest airports and subways to Fortune 500 corporate buildings, hospitals, hotels, universities, sports venues, government, industrial, and logistics facilities. SOLiD continuously innovates to deliver best-in-class connectivity solutions that scale to every need. For more information, visit www.solid.com/us.
