Qualcomm Unveils Industry's First Release 16 5G Open RAN Platform For Small Cells

• Extending 5G Leadership with Second Generation Qualcomm 5G RAN Platform for Small Cells (FSM200xx) with Global Spectrum Band Support Spanning mmWave and Sub-6 GHz for Enhanced Coverage
• Industry’s First 3GPP Release 16 5G Modem-RF System Designed to Support Industry 4.0 including the Factory of the Future and Other New Segments

What’s New: Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. today announced its second-generation Qualcomm 5G RAN Platform for Small Cells (FSM200xx), the industry’s first 3GPP Release 16 5G Open RAN platform. The new platform brings major enhancements to RF with its support for all commercial global mmWave and Sub-6 GHz bands, including the new n259 (41 GHz), n258(26 GHz) and FDD bands. Building on growing commercial momentum with FSM100xx, this next generation platform is primed to take powerful mmWave performance to more places, indoors and outdoors, and around the globe, while, in parallel, introducing new Sub-6 GHz opportunities with small cell densification in public and private networks. These feature advancements and new spectrum support aim to drive unprecedented mobile experiences, accelerate 5G performance and availability to users worldwide, and reshape opportunities for homes, airports, stadiums, hospitals, offices, and manufacturing facilities. Additionally, with its Release 16 support, the new platform is designed to power the transition to the factory of the future with its support for features including Enhanced Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communication (eURLLC) that are critical to controlling equipment and machines.

Qualcomm 5G RAN Platform for Small Cells (FSM200xx) features include:

• Cutting edge technologies with unmatched data speeds, capacity, and global band support: Designed for extending mobile 5G mmWave coverage and power efficiency, the comprehensive 3GPP Release 16 Modem-RF solution offers unmatched data speeds of up to 8 Gbps with 1 GHz bandwidth support on mmWave and support for wider 200MHz carrier bandwidth. The Qualcomm 5G RAN Platform for Small Cells (FSM200xx) is also designed to support spectrum aggregation of 200 MHz of Sub-6 GHz spectrum across FDD and TDD delivering data speeds of up to 4 Gbps. This feature-rich solution combines powerful performance with power efficient and small form factor designs.
• Flexible and open architectures: The Qualcomm 5G RAN Platform for Small Cells (FSM200xx) is designed to support open and virtualized RAN combined with open interfaces to facilitate scalable and cost-effective 5G RAN networks spanning mmWave and Sub-6 GHz. Additionally, the Open RAN (O-RAN) compliant offering is designed to support all key 5G functional split options allowing for the disaggregation of the RAN into standards-based and interoperable modular components which provides OEMs and operators enhanced deployment flexibility. Overall, the flexible and open architecture is poised to foster innovation across the 5G infrastructure ecosystem, from start-ups to small and large companies, accelerating the transition to infrastructure 2.0 and the adoption of 5G private networks.
• Leading power efficiency for enterprise grade: Leading 4nm process node offers superior power efficiency, high performance and reliability while being designed to address challenging power, cost, and size requirements for indoor and outdoor deployments. With its lower power operation, the Qualcomm 5G RAN Platform for Small Cells (FSM200xx) enables Power over Ethernet (PoE) support which is designed to allow utilization of power and backhaul from one source which simplifies deployments and reduces cost. It also is designed to facilitate small form factor designs for indoor deployments in offices, factories, and public venues.

Why It’s Important:
The Qualcomm 5G RAN Platform for Small Cells (FSM200xx), the industry’s first 3GPP Release 16 5G Open RAN platform, aims to help power the factory of the future and accelerate the transition to industry 4.0 with its support of features such as eURLLC to provide low latency and link reliability (up to 99.9999%) needed for factory automation and mission critical control of equipment and machines. This platform is designed to address the demands of 5G, including public and private networks, indoor and outdoor mmWave and Sub-6 GHz deployments, industrial automation, and more.

The new platform is designed to deliver seamless connectivity in crowded environments like airports, venues, hospitals, and train stations and enable established and emerging vendors to accelerate the deployment and commercialization of open and virtualized 5G RAN networks. The ultimate goal is to have end users benefit from low latency communications and enhanced experiences across a variety of connected mobile devices.

“Qualcomm Technologies’ engineers have been leading in the small cells industry for over a decade with our Qualcomm RAN platform. As Open RAN and small cells infrastructure continue to gain momentum, Qualcomm Technologies is at the forefront of delivering cutting edge 5G mmWave and Sub-6 GHz technology to power 5G networks on a global scale,” said Gerardo Giaretta, senior director, product management, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. “Small cells have been at the heart of the global 5G proliferation and Qualcomm Technologies is leading the charge as the industry transitions to open and virtualized 5G RAN networks.”

Qualcomm Technologies is excited to collaborate with top-tier OEMs and operators in this transition to the next generation infrastructure.

Airspan
“Airspan has a long and successful relation with Qualcomm Technologies and the Qualcomm FSM platform, with hundreds of thousands of radios deployed worldwide using this technology. We congratulate Qualcomm Technologies on the new Qualcomm 5G RAN Platform for Small Cells (FSM200xx),” said Eli Leizerovitz, head of products, Airspan. “Our engineering teams are eager to start working with this new platform for our next 5G radio generation to keep bringing the innovation our customers require.”

Altiostar
“Qualcomm Technologies has been an important collaborator for Altiostar, working with us to build the world’s largest high-performance Open RAN network in Japan,” said Anil Sawkar, vice president of engineering and operations, Altiostar. “Small cells will be the next big area of growth for Open RAN because they enable added wireless capacity and enterprise applications. We view this new product as a key development in Open RAN and 5G and look forward to continuing our work with Qualcomm Technologies.”

Askey
"Askey is looking forward to Qualcomm Technologies’ evolving 3GPP Rel 16 compliant next generation Qualcomm 5G RAN Platform for Small Cells (FSM 200xx) with the aim to support mmWave and Sub-6 GHz bands and new 5G use cases for the public and private networks,” said Robert Lin, chief executive officer, Askey.

Baicells
“Qualcomm Technologies has been a fantastic collaborator and enabler of Baicells for the 5G and 4G technologies. We did quite a lot of innovation working with Qualcomm Technologies and brought products with the FSM platform to mobile carriers, private sectors as well as internet service providers,” said Wei Bai, general manager of international market, Baciells. “Baicells is excited to use the Qualcomm 5G RAN Platform for Small Cells (FSM200xx) to develop our next generation 5G Open RAN gNB and we believe this product will bring a bigger value for our customers.”

Capgemini Engineering
“As enterprises traverse this digital journey of 5G and virtualization towards intelligent industry, we see URLLC, O-RAN compatibility and low power solutions as key requirements of their next generation 5G private networks,” said Shamik Mishra, chief technology officer and head of connectivity, Capgemini Engineering, a key 5G network centric integrator and platform provider for 5G OEMs. “Capgemini Engineering continues to nurture and extend its collaboration with Qualcomm Technologies in creating mature, feature rich 5G control plane and RAN platforms for Sub-6 GHz and mmWave bands accelerating development of the 5G OEM and ODM ecosystem for Industry 4.0 and Private network use cases. Introduction of newer 3GPP R16 features will further expand and enable the adoption of these technologies to benefit industries such as manufacturing and automotive for advanced use cases.”

Foxconn Industrial Internet
"Foxconn Industrial Internet USA Inc. (FII-USA Inc.), a recognized world leader in 5G equipment manufacturing and end-to-end small cell solution provider, continues to leverage its 30+ years of experience to develop 5G O-RAN compliant solution and to further drive 5G densification as part of Industry4.0. FII-USA currently utilizes Qualcomm FSM family products for indoor and outdoor small cell solutions,” said Justin Xiang, vice president of sales and marketing, FII-USA. “We look forward to working with the Qualcomm 5G RAN Platform for Small Cells (FSM200xx) which we believe will allow FII-USA to further extend its technological leadership and provide customers with quality high-performance 5G RAN solutions. FII-USA is excited to see Qualcomm Technologies’ launch of the new platform and look forward to leveraging Qualcomm Technologies’ latest FSM platform on our next-gen 5G small cell, O-RAN radios, and industrial private cellular network solution."

Innowireless Co., Ltd
“As 5G NR deployments become mainstream with the major communication service providers worldwide, Innowireless has been providing small cell solutions (under the brand name Qucell) based on Qualcomm FSM90xx in 4G and FSM100xx in 5G. With the Qualcomm 5G RAN Platform for Small Cells (FSM200xx), Innowireless feels that it will enable our customers with more advanced features, performance, capacity, global band support promised by 5G technology for indoors, outdoors, and small cell densification in public and private networks,” said Young-soo Kwak, chief executive officer, Innowireless Co., Ltd. “We look forward to working closely with the Qualcomm FSM200xx platform to deliver more industry proven commercial-ready small cell solutions to those customers who would like the latest in the 5G small cell industry.”

Radisys
“Radisys has a longstanding relationship with Qualcomm Technologies to integrate our industry-leading small cell software with the FSM platform from LTE to its 5G platform for both mmWave and Sub-6 GHz bands where we demonstrated 1Gbp+ throughput,” said Munish Chhabra, head of mobility software and services, Radisys. “Qualcomm Technologies’ next generation Qualcomm 5G RAN Platform for Small Cells (FSM200xx) is an exciting next step in the transition to Open RAN architectures. It will once again integrate our small cell software stack which is Release 16 ready with support for ultra-reliable low latency communications built in. Together we’ll support our OEM customers who are targeting to deploy with mobile operators and enterprises that want to leverage an open and virtualized ecosystem.”

Rakuten Mobile
“The Qualcomm RAN Platforms play a key role in both our 4G small cell and 5G mmWave deployments,” said Tareq Amin, representative director, executive vice president and chief technology officer, Rakuten Mobile, Inc. “We are very excited to see the announcement of the new FSM200xx solution and look forward to how it will support more powerful 3GPP Release 16 features such as eURLLC and flexible architecture on our virtualized RAN platform for different use cases."

Sercomm
"Sercomm was proud to be the first in the world developing and installing mmWave small cell in December 2020 in the semiconductor packaging factory in Taiwan for factory automation using the Qualcomm 5G RAN Platform for Small Cells (FSM10055)," said Ben Lin, chief technology officer, Sercomm. "We look forward to collaborating with Qualcomm Technologies again to design in Qualcomm 5G RAN Platform for Small Cells (FSM200xx) to our next generation 3GPP R16 compliant 5GNR small cell to provide much lower latency for timing sensitive applications."

Shenzhen GongJin Electronics Co., Ltd
"As a long-term collaborator with Qualcomm Technologies, we have worked closely on small cell platforms, including FSM90xx, FSM99xx and the current FSM100xx platform," said Hu Zumin, chief executive officer, Shenzhen GongJin Electronics Co., Ltd. "GongJin looks forward to working closely with Qualcomm Technologies on the Qualcomm 5G RAN Platform for Small Cells (FSM200xx) to contribute to the development of the 5G industry by developing more competitive products with higher performance, lower power consumption, and other technical advantages."

The Qualcomm 5G RAN Platform for Small Cells (FSM200xx) is expected to start sampling to customers in the first half of 2022.

For more information on Qualcomm 5G RAN Platforms, please visit https://www.qualcomm.com/products/5g and watch for a video testimonial by Gerardo Giaretta.

About Qualcomm
Qualcomm is the world’s leading wireless technology innovator and the driving force behind the development, launch, and expansion of 5G. When we connected the phone to the internet, the mobile revolution was born. Today, our foundational technologies enable the mobile ecosystem and are found in every 3G, 4G and 5G smartphone. We bring the benefits of mobile to new industries, including automotive, the internet of things, and computing, and are leading the way to a world where everything and everyone can communicate and interact seamlessly.

Qualcomm Incorporated includes our licensing business, QTL, and the vast majority of our patent portfolio. Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., a subsidiary of Qualcomm Incorporated, operates, along with its subsidiaries, substantially all of our engineering, research and development functions, and substantially all of our products and services businesses, including our QCT semiconductor business.