Computer technology developer Xilinx, Inc. (NASDAQ: XLNX), yesterday announced that the Xilinx® Versal™ adaptive compute acceleration platform (ACAP) will be utilized by Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., for worldwide 5G commercial deployments. Xilinx Versal ACAPs provide a universal, flexible and scalable platform that can address multiple operator requirements across multiple geographies.
“Samsung is a trailblazer when it comes to 5G innovation and we are excited to play an essential role in its 5G commercial deployments,” said Liam Madden, executive vice president and general manager, Wired and Wireless Group, Xilinx. “Versal ACAPs will provide Samsung with the superior signal processing performance and adaptability needed to deliver an exceptional 5G experience to its customers now and into the future.”
Versal ACAP – a highly-integrated, multicore, heterogeneous compute platform – operates at the heart of 5G to perform the complex, real-time signal processing, including the sophisticated beamforming techniques used to increase network capacity.
5G requires beamforming, which allows multiple data streams to be transmitted simultaneously to multiple users using the same spectrum. This is what enables the dramatic increase in 5G network capacity. Beamforming technology, however, requires significant compute density and advanced high-speed connectivity – on-chip and off-chip – to meet 5G’s low-latency requirements. Adding to this, different system functional partition requirements and algorithm implementations lead to a wide range of processing performance and compute precision. It is extremely challenging for traditional FPGAs to optimally address this requirement while meeting thermal and system footprint constraints.
Versal ACAPs offer, according to Madden, exceptional compute density at low power consumption to perform the real-time, low-latency signal processing demanded by beamforming algorithms. The AI Engines, which are part of the Versal AI Core series, are comprised of a tiled array of vector processors required to implement the mathematical functions offering high compute density, advanced connectivity, as well as the ability to be reprogrammed and reconfigured even after deployment.
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