Semiconductor company Marvell Technology Group made a move on the open RAN market, challenging chip giant Qualcomm with the introduction of a new platform compatible with the approach.

The company’s offering comprises O-RAN Alliance-compliant silicon, software and hardware reference designs spanning the radio unit (RU), distributed unit (DU) and centralised unit (CU). New Fusion-O chips are based on the company’s previously-announced OCTEON baseband processors, which are capable of delivering up to 15Gb/s capacity.

Raj Singh, EVP and GM of Marvell’s processor business group, stated the platform offers “a seamless path to commercial 5G open” and virtualised RAN.

Development kits will be available from Q1 2021.

On a recent earnings call, Marvell CEO Matt Murphy stated the addition of open and virtualised RAN products to its portfolio would round out its 5G platform capabilities, covering all architectures “on a common hardware and software framework”.

Qualcomm unveiled its range of open RAN chipsets in October, targeting sample quantities in H1 2022.