No Small Feat – Radisys wins SCF Small Cell Award for Outstanding Contribution to Small Cell Open RAN Platforms

May 24, 2021 Munish Chhabra

I am excited to share that Radisys’ 5G Small Cell Software with FAPI support has won a coveted Small Cell Forum’s Award this year.

The SCF’s Small Cell Awards recognizes outstanding achievement within, and contributions to, the global small cell industry. Caroline Gabriel, the SCF Chair of Judges and Rethink Research Co-founder remarked, “The judges were pleased to recognize Radisys’ many efforts in contributing to open standards in recent years, and thought its implementation of FAPI support in its 5G software stack was particularly significant, making it simpler for vendors to base their designs on open platforms at every layer.”

Radisys’ 5G Small Cell Software is a complete offering that supports the latest standards from 3GPP, the Small Cell Forum and the O-RAN Alliance. The software also includes evolved feature sets and supports both sub-6 GHz and mmWave bands. By leveraging SCF’s FAPI and nFAPI open interfaces, it is able to work seamlessly on our partners’ SoC-based small cell platforms to provide a proven, deployment-ready solution, today.

While this is the first award win for our 5G Small Cell Software with FAPI support, it is only one of many “firsts.” Radisys’ small cell software was the first to support mmWave spectrum, the first to support an Open Distributed Unit, and the first to benchmark a pre-integrated small cell solution with Qualcomm.

Open APIs for chips, networks and applications are critical for driving 5G connectivity across a wide variety of devices in a multi-vendor ecosystem. Radisys is a leading contributor and integrator of 5G FAPI implementations in the O-RAN open-source community (o-ran-sc.org), and our 5G Small Cell Software is the first available open source reference implementation which accelerates adoption of SCF 5G FAPI in the industry.

Radisys continues to work with our key partners to enable a 5G small cell ecosystem that leverages the FAPI specifications to accelerate the delivery of a highly integrated 5G small cell solution to the industry. Here are just a few examples:

  • Qualcomm - Radisys’ 5G Small Cell Software has been integrated on the Qualcomm FSM 5G Platform, delivering a complete, pre-integrated, pre-tested, and pre-validated 5G platform for both mmWave and sub-6 GHz bands. The optimized solution leverages Radisys’ 5G NR mmWave Non-standalone (NSA) and Standalone (SA) mode on the Qualcomm FSM100xx mmWave SoC, and it supports both FDD and TDD deployments. You can learn more about our joint solution here.
  • Picocom - Radisys and Picocom are engaged in interoperability testing using Picocom’s PHY Software Integration Kit (SIK), with Radisys’ 5G Small Cell Software compliant to the 5G FAPI specification. Together, we are enabling developers to perform integration and interoperability testing of Picocom SoC-based Open RAN equipment before silicon availability. You can read more about the interoperability testing here.
  • NXP - Radisys and NXP have demonstrated a joint sub-6 GHz solution that enables flexible design options, 3GPP Split 6 design, and combined RU+DU unit with the all-in-one small cell for 5G NR deployments. You can watch a video of the demonstration here.

SCF’s FAPI standardization helps further an Open RAN ecosystem. Radisys’ robust set of application programming interfaces enables fully open, multi-vendor 5G small cell designs which provides multi- vendor choice and cost efficiency. To learn more about Radisys’ 5G Small Cell Software with FAPI support, visit www.radisys.com/ConnectOpenRAN.

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