Accton and Picocom partner on 5G Open RAN radio unit products

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Picocom, the Bristol-based 5G Open RAN baseband semiconductor and software specialist, has entered into a partnership agreement with Accton Technology Group.

Accton is a provider of networking and communications solutions and the partnership is focused on upcoming 5G Open RAN products. Picocom silicon and software will power Accton’s new 5G Open RAN radio units (O-RUs), and Accton will bring Picocom’s ORANIC in-line PHY/NIC distributed unit (O-DU) card to the mass market.

"As a leader in the wireless industry, it is paramount that we seek out and partner with the best technology providers available. Picocom has emerged as the 5G Open RAN PHY provider of choice. Accton has been closely monitoring and working with Picocom for some time - we are pleased to be able to go public with our multi-layered partnership," said Mingshou Liu, President of Accton Technology China.

Commenting Peter Claydon, President of Picocom, added, "Accton will not only help realise ORANIC into the fully-featured product that the industry needs and wants, but we’ll also see PC802 devices and our 5G NR O-RU software at the heart of future Accton O-RU products."

PC802 is shipping in mass production quantities together with mature software for Open RAN Distributed Units (O-DU) and Radio Units (O-RU), as well as integrated small cells. In addition, PC802 supports both 4G LTE and 5G NR.

The PC802 ‘ORANIC’ is an Open RAN in-line PHY and NIC board, designed for 5G O-RAN O-DU servers. It interfaces to L2 software via the Open RAN SCF FAPI interface and includes 4 PC802s, driving 4 25G SFPs. O-RAN Open Fronthaul interface processing is integrated directly into PC802. ORANIC is capable of driving 16 2T2R or 8 4T4R O-RUs.