This is the first in a series of blogs covering the migration towards ARM technology in the rapidly evolving telecom-infrastructure market.
A lot has been written recently regarding the challenges facing the industry to meet the demand for content and data over both wire line and wireless networks. As an introduction to the competitive pressures facing the telecoms infrastructure players, take a look at my previous blog titled Balancing the economics of delivering ubiquitous mobile data services
Looking back over the two years’ since I joined ARM, the pace of innovation being enabled in the infrastructure market has been rapid and could almost be missed if you have not been paying attention. Capacity and operating expense challenges are driving the market, and ARM partners have combined their implementation and networking expertise with ARM technology to drive impressive solutions to address end use demands.
Illustrating this point were recent announcements made by silicon partners including LSI Corporation, with their AXXIA 5500 processor to target the needs of mobile and fixed networks, and Qualcomm Technologies’ with their FSM9900 family of Small Cell chip sets.
The LSI announcement highlighted that the 16 core ARM Cortex-A15 device that utilises a cache coherent interconnect (CoreLink CCN-504 Cache Coherent Network) from ARM is now being shipped to key OEMs. The delivery of Axxia 5500 means that LSI customers are now building ARM based Axxia processor performance and efficiency into systems that will represent over half of the mobile base station market. The LSI Axxia processor family is also being applied in many other applications, such as data centres and enterprise networking.
The Qualcomm Technologies’ announcement with their Krait based FSM9000 family of Small Cell chipsets also targeted the cellular base station market. Qualcomm made an announcement with Alcatel Lucent that the two companies were going to collaborate on the development of a series of Base Station products to specifically target the requirements of the emerging Small Cells market.
However, successful deployment of new equipment based on ARM processors and IP is not only the result of successful silicon innovation. A significant investment is being made into a wide variety of systems and software initiatives that will enable a faster pace of network evolution to meet rapidly changing network traffic demands. The collaborative nature of the ARM partnership is unparalleled, and within the subset of the ecosystem focused on telecom infrastructure we are jointly focused on enabling standard, open networks. One example of type of collaboration took place last month when ARM hosted a reception for many of the companies collaborating on the development of infrastructure networking and server equipment and software based on ARM technology. The event illustrated the massive growth in interest and adoption across the technology spectrum of ARM based IP with 37 industry leading companies represented.
Topics discussed included the wider challenges facing the industry as it rolls out a network to try and handle the massive increase in demands being placed by uptake in social media and how to handle content distribution over the wire line and wireless infrastructure networks. The contributors to Linaro’s LNG and LEG working groups (Linaro Networking Group and Linaro Enterprise Group) looked at how the activities of both groups could be combined to target the more flexible optimised network elements. Some of the common themes included how to provide platforms to support more flexible backhaul using Software Defined Networking, how more flexible compute and data plane elements could be developed to meet the needs of Network Functions Virtualisation and Content Delivery, and how to develop more scalable Base Station technologies to support the range of S-RAN and C-RAN requirements.
Continued collaboration between the companies on software and systems issues can augment the new and innovative system on chip devices that companies like Qualcomm and LSI are developing and provide a platform to overcome the challenges faced by OEM’s and Operators as they tackle the new mobile, connected world.
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Hi Andy, Indeed it is great to see this sort of progress. Generally time to market for telecom infrastructure designs are a lot longer than you'd expect typically in the consumer and industrial spaces. In the case of LSI with the AXXIA device, they are sampling to customers and development is well under way. Development and porting of new software will take a while but I'd expect to see these products start to ship in the next year or so.