EdgeQ, the startup making basestation-on-a-chip silicon and software for 5G deployments, is now sampling its chip and phy software. The company has also released a few more details about its silicon and software stack.
According to EdgeQ CEO Vinay Ravuri, the company has had its chip back in the lab for “about six weeks”.
“Within two weeks we actually got full Linux running and it looks solid, and we are able to send 5G traffic through the chip,” Ravuri told EE Times.
EdgeQ’s idea is to integrate the various chips that make up a basestation onto one piece of programmable silicon, thereby reducing the overall power consumption and cost of building a basestation.
EdgeQ’s evaluation card features its chip, plus baseband and RF components. Loading the EdgeQ chip with different firmware can change the system on the card from a distributed unit (DU) to a radio unit (RU) or access point (gNodeB).
The chip itself features a 50-core signal processor. The 50 RISC-V cores are identical and are dynamically programmable to process the phy layer features which are implemented in software. The core is licensed from Andes and customized with EdgeQ’s instruction extensions specific to 5G and AI workloads.