Revolutionizing High Performance Silicon

As 5G wireless communication systems continue to be deployed, enterprises are busy planning for 6G- the next generation of wireless communication set to transform our lives. Poised to merge communication and computing, 6G promises to create a hyperconnected world that blends digital and physical experiences with ultra-fast speeds and low latency as a starting point.

Building on the foundation laid by 5G, 6G will continue supporting improved data latency, security, reliability and the ability to process massive volumes of data in real-time. It will also challenge what's possible by bringing new, groundbreaking capabilities to the forefront, including expanded ubiquitous connectivity, integrated sensing and communication and advanced artificial intelligence.

The Need for Faster, Smarter Networks:

In today's technology driven era, we rely on our handhelds, smartphones and mobile devices to fulfill day to day tasks, most of which are driven by on devices or cloud based AI and ML. Connectivity and compute power are the most important factors enabling on cloud large language models to process the responds to human interaction. 

The communication infrastructure currently operates over 4G or 5G networks. It started not long ago with bandwidth in Kbps range in 2G and has now evolved to Gbps in 5G. On the horizon, the existing 5G wireless communication infrastructure will soon evolved to 6G, offering bandwidth of Tbps. A much higher network bandwidth is needed with the increasing number of devices and complex AI workloads. 

Network infrastructure giants are already looking to update their hardware to support speeds 50-100 times faster than 5G, with air latency under 100us, and wider network coverage and reliability.

With this new infra for 6G, carrier support and hardware/software support will require new RF designs and chipsets capable of supporting higher communication frequencies, possibly up to 1THz. Although newer networks may be designed for more data bits per kilowatts of power efficiency, the increase in density, traffic and processing speeds tends to negate these savings.

The wireless technology trend of the existing 5G network is built around innovation in processors and wireless technology on mobile devices, and in wireless base stations and cells. Base stations are replaced by RUs (radio units), DUs (distributed units), and CUs (centralized units). The radio units manage antennas in real-time through multicore processor chips.

The distributed and centralized units provide support for the lower and upper layers of the protocol stack, respectively. These protocol stacks operate on compute chipsets, which are mounted on hardware acceleration cards to handle protocol processing. Radio, distributed, and centralized units need to handle a lot of radio processing and traffic data. 

With even higher throughput and extremely complex workloads in the new 6G infrastructure, network architecture, software, and hardware accelerator card equipment will need an upgrade or redesign to process and handle much larger amounts of data. The processor compute chipsets on the accelerator cards manage up to dozens of antennas simultaneously and will need to grow in compute power as requirements become more complex with the move to 6G.   

To fulfill the needs of this rapidly advancing semiconductor industry, working on a sophisticated chipset that uses compute Subsystems. These compute chipsets are vital for supporting the demanding requirements of 6G/5G infrastructure, cloud and edge compute applications and for handling enterprise networking, server, and AI/ML markets. This handle intensive workload efficiency, performance optimization and power savings in both compute and accelerator chipsets.   

The ecosystem of hardware and software is targeted for new generations of wireless mobile communications equipment and the wireless infrastructure’s cloud-based deployment. Software developers continue to port operating systems and tools to support compute subsystems. These tools allow developers to scale their code using SVE (Scalable Vector Extension) to different vector lengths, reflecting new or updated hardware architecture, whereas traditional processors only handle vectors of specific widths.

Traditional architectures require code to be rebuilt to handle additional vector bandwidth updates. SVE allows scalable vector performance on 5G RAN (Radio Access Network), a wireless communication architecture that uses 5G radio frequencies to provide wireless connectivity to devices. RANs perform complex processing when voice and data are converted to digital signals and transmitted as radio waves to RAN transceivers, to the core network, and onto the internet.

The radio spectrum requirements for performance, capacity, speed, and latency will be redefined to support 6G, along with the connections of millions of devices per square kilometer. Base stations, antenna units, edge data servers, and cells will need to migrate to support an upgraded network architecture. 

The Future of Wireless: Chipsets and System-in-Package Solutions

By utilizing a high-performance process node, working with its technologies, can offer compute chipsets that enable faster development, low risk and reduced time-to-market by packaging known good dice with customers’ accelerator chipsets. 

The compute chipset leverages standard packaging as a modular chipset and can optionally be implemented as a monolithic ASIC. The chipset portfolio is complemented by a connectivity suite of standards-based, silicon-proven technologies, including PCIe, CXL, Universal Chipset Express (UCI), and memory subsystems.