Running With O-RAN
Summary
Many new companies are in 5G chip development now, delivering custom solutions that match the many configurations need for different rural and city density needs. O-RAN is so critical to the 5G ecosystem that in June, Mentor formally announced membership in the O-RAN Alliance to help drive interoperability requirements for 5G silicon. With an agile software architecture, new standard features can be implemented quickly with no changes required for the tool hardware itself. VirtuaLAB models provide virtual representations of protocols, like Ethernet, to enable pre-silicon verification of interfaces on the SoC. In the post-silicon solution (Figure 3), the actual silicon is available and verification teams begin their work in the lab using the X-STEP hardware to generate, capture, and analyze bit-accurate fronthaul traffic for any line rate.