Enea to Demo Unique Linux Real-Time Acceleration at Mobile World Congress Shanghai

Enea AB

2018-06-25 22:39 1604

Solution based on Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ Reduces CAPEX, Improves Performance and Facilitates Migration to C-RAN

STOCKHOLM, June 25, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

Enea® (NASDAQ OMX Nordic: ENEA) today announced a demonstration of a real-time accelerated Linux solution at Mobile World Congress Shanghai, taking place June 27-29. The solution, suitable for 5G and C-RAN (Cloud-RAN), reduces CAPEX and improves performance thanks to efficient hardware utilization. The demo leverages a reference design using the Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ platform.

The showcased solution combines a standard Linux environment with a real-time domain. This is perfectly in line with runtime needs in the Radio Access Network (RAN), where low-level functions require both determinism and high performance, while higher protocol layers that have more relaxed real-time requirements can run standard Linux. Enea's real-time accelerated solution allows these functions to be consolidated onto the Cortex A cluster of the Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ System-on-Chip (SoC). The result is a highly flexible design, where functionality is decoupled from hardware.

This flexible solution uses the same runtime environment on both sides of the Central Unit (CU) / Distributed Unit (DU) split, which facilitates a gradual evolution of the RAN, with a smooth and phased migration of functions from a distributed to a centralized or cloud architecture (C-RAN).

Enea's real-time accelerated Linux solution is a framework combining standard Symmetric Multi-Processing (SMP) Linux with a real-time executive, on top of a type 0/1 hypervisor which provides bare metal access to the real-time environment and fast inter-process communication between the domains. Intended for homogenous multicore processors, it allows the number of cores allocated to the real-time and Linux domains to be configured at boot time.

The reference implementation on display at Mobile World Congress Shanghai is running on Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+, a versatile SoC with a quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 as the main processor, targeting high performance applications including 5G and C-RAN.

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