LIVE FROM MWC21 BARCELONA: Qualcomm announced the newest additions to its 5G portfolio, as president and CEO-elect Cristiano Amon (pictured) hailed its innovations as helping shape the future mobile ecosystem.

Among the new products are a 5G mobile platform for Android phones, an accelerator card targeting open RAN deployments and a 5G small cell chipset designed to be compatible with all commercial global mmWave and sub-6GHz bands.

Talking-up the latest addition to its infrastructure line during his keynote, Amon highlighted the value of mmWave spectrum deployments.

The executive claimed operators had found where capacity needs were high, use of mmWave had low total cost of ownership and “the best 5G” combined various spectrum assets.

Device boost
At its associated press conference, Qualcomm claimed its new Snapdragon 888 Plus mobile platform brings a speed improvement of more than 20 per cent to its AI engine, a feature important for gaming and other media experiences.

The company added the Snapdragon 888 Plus will be available in commercial smartphones shipped by Asus, Honor, Motorola, Vivo and Xiaomi from Q3.

Fang Fei, president of product line at Honor noted the bump in AI performance provides “the flexibility to create a mobile experience that will fulfill the needs of even the most demanding users”.

Networks
At its event Qualcomm explained its 5G DU X100 Accelerator Card can simplify open RAN fronthaul deployments.

It is compatible with sub-6GHz and mmWave baseband concurrently. Qualcomm stated it will support virtualised RAN deployments by easing the workload for central processing units in off-the-shelf servers by offloading functions including demodulation, beamforming, channel coding and Massive MIMO.

The vendor’s FSM200xx 5G chipset for small cells offers data speeds of up to 8Gb/s and is compatible with all commercial global mmWave and sub-6GHz bands.

Qualcomm stated the chipset is the first Release-16 open RAN platform.