AccelerComm announces 5G IP with O-RAN Acceleration Abstraction Layer (AAL) interface

Southampton, UK – AccelerComm, the company supercharging 5G with physical layer IP which increases spectral efficiency and reduces latency, today announced that it has successfully demonstrated a fully compliant O-RAN AAL (Acceleration Abstraction Layer) Forward Error Correction (FEC) product for the Xilinx Telco Accelerator cards. This carrier-grade product enables AccelerComm’s high performance 5G NR LDPC encoding and decoding IP solutions to be rapidly and efficiently used as hardware accelerators in industry standard servers across a PCIe bus using the O-RAN AAL interface. AccelerComm joined the O-RAN ALLIANCE in December 2020 and has been an active participant in the technical development of the organisation’s physical layer standards.

Following the work in O-RAN Working Group 6 to finalise a standard which defines the hardware accelerator interface functions and protocols, known as the AAL interface, (see O-RAN ALLIANCE press release) AccelerComm has successfully demonstrated compliance to this standard. Using a Xilinx Telco card incorporating AccelerComm 5G physical layer IP and drivers, the company demonstrated Block Error Rate (BLER) and throughput tests of their high performance LDPC IP, as well as basic compliance with interface test vectors.

“Central to the success of O-RAN 5G networks is operators being able to minimise their operational costs and maximise the flexibility of their RAN deployments,” said Eric Dowek, Segment Marketing Director at AccelerComm. “This interface enables MNOs with AAL-compliant DUs to use accelerator cards from different vendors which, as well as easing their operational costs, means that operators can select the accelerator card that performs best in a particular use case scenario, thereby helping them to get the best return on investment out of their network.”

AccelerComm’s portfolio of advanced channel coding solutions contain unique cutting-edge technology to maximize spectral efficiency and reduce latency for truly high-performance Open RAN 5G communications systems. This enables the next generation of services requiring ultra-reliable, low latency communications, such as VR/AR, industrial IoT, autonomous vehicles and drone control.