SOLiD Selects MaxLinear’s Sierra Radio SoC for Next Generation 5G O-RAN Radio Unit

SOLiD Selects MaxLinear’s Sierra Radio SoC for Next Generation 5G O-RAN Radio Unit

Highly integrated Radio System on Chip (SoC) accelerates the development of Open RAN radio units (O-RUs) with lower size, weight, power, cooling, and cost

CARLSBAD, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–MaxLinear, Inc. (Nasdaq: MXL), a leader in wireless infrastructure silicon solutions, today announced that SOLiD, a leader in cellular in-building mobile coverage, has selected the Sierra single chip Radio SoC for its next generation of Indoor O-RUs. Sierra is a highly integrated SoC optimized for 4G/5G Open Radio Access Network (RAN) radio units (RU).

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SOLiD selects MaxLinear’s Sierra Radio SoC for Next-Gen 5G Open Radio Access Network Radio Units. (Graphic: Business Wire)

SOLiD’s Indoor O-RAN RU series is an exciting new product line supporting both NR/LTE/NB-IoT and TDD/FDD. Solid’s O-RAN RUs offer high performance and flexibility in an ultra-compact size and low power consumption footprint enabled by MaxLinear’s Sierra Radio SoC.

Sierra is an innovative Radio SoC that flexibly supports all major RU applications, including traditional macro, massive MIMO, pico, all-in-one small cells, and more. Sierra integrates the following sub-systems into a single chip, providing a complete software-programmable radio signal processing engine for O-RUs:

RF transceiver supporting up to 8 transmitters, 8 receivers, and 2 feedback receivers
Digital Front End (DFE), including MaxLIN digital pre-distortion (DPD), crest factor reduction (CFR), and Passive Intermodulation (PIM) cancellation
Low-PHY baseband processor supporting 5G, 4G, and NB-IoT air interfaces
O-RAN Alliance Split 7.2x fronthaul interface

“The close collaboration between SOLiD and MaxLinear has dramatically sped up the development of our new 5G O-RUs,” said Vice President Hyun-Chae Kim at SOLiD. “The superior level of system integration and flexibility provided by their Sierra SoC has enabled us to reduce the size and power consumption of our product line, while their technical teams provide us with close support that accelerates our time to market.”

“Sierra is an ultimate integration of MaxLinear’s highest performance RF and system technologies,” said Puneet Sethi, Vice President of MaxLinear’s Wireless Infrastructure BU. “It empowers radio vendors to rapidly and cost effectively develop new platforms with smaller size, lower weight, and higher energy efficiency for Open RAN applications. In this way Sierra is a game-changing innovation that levels the playing field for wireless infrastructure vendors and can dramatically accelerate the global rollout of Open RAN without compromise on network performance or cost.”

The global Open RAN market is growing and is estimated to be worth USD $2.8 billion in 2024 and USD $20.9 billion by 2030, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 39.4% during the forecast period, according to the latest Open RAN Market Report from MarketsandMarkets in August 2024.

About MaxLinear’s Sierra Radio SoC Solution

Sierra’s RF transceiver uses a low-power wide-band Zero-IF (ZIF) architecture and supports 8 transmitters (TX) and 8 receivers (RX) with 2 feedback receivers (FBRX). Each RX supports wide signal bandwidths up to 400MHz and each TX and FBRX supports signal bandwidths up to 900MHz. It can operate in 8T8R single-band or 2 x 4T4R multi-band configurations.

The DFE integrates DPD, CFR, PIM cancellation, digital up conversion (DUC), and digital down conversion (DDC) blocks. MaxLinear’s proprietary DPD/CFR technology, MaxLIN™, linearizes power amplifiers (PA) up to 400MHz of occupied bandwidth and dramatically improves PA energy efficiency while meeting spectral emission masks with margin. The PIMC block cancels passive intermodulation products in the uplink paths to improve receiver sensitivity and relax the specification of expensive RF filters. The DUC/DDC supports up to eight component carriers per transmit and receive path.

The Low-PHY baseband processor supports 4G, 5G, and NB-IoT air interfaces, including uplink PRACH processing. It can process up to eight component carriers (CC) per transmit and receive path and it is software configurable for different modes and parameters including dynamic spectrum sharing (DSS), bandwidth parts, mixed numerology, and windowing.

Sierra supports an O-RAN fronthaul Split Option 7.2x Category A interface with up to four 10 or 25Gbit/s Ethernet interfaces.

Sierra integrates an embedded CPU for system control. The CPU is an integrated quad-core Arm® A53 processor with Neon™ extensions. Each Arm® core has 1MB of internal SRAM and has access to an additional 8GB of external DRAM through a DDR controller.

For more information on the Sierra RF Radio SoC or MaxLIN DPD linearization technology, visit:

SOLiD’s latest indoor radio unit, powered by Sierra, will be on display in MaxLinear’s meeting room 2L8MR during the MWC 2025 trade show in the Fira Gran Via, Barcelona from Monday, March 3 to Thursday, March 6.

About MaxLinear, Inc.

MaxLinear, Inc. (Nasdaq: MXL) is a leading provider of radio frequency (RF), analog, digital, and mixed-signal integrated circuits for access and connectivity, wired and wireless infrastructure, and industrial and multimarket applications. MaxLinear is headquartered in Carlsbad, California. For more information, please visit https://www.maxlinear.com/.

All third-party marks and logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders/owners.

About SOLiD

SOLiD enables indoor and outdoor cellular at many of the world’s best-known and most challenging venues — from the busiest airports and subways to Fortune 500 corporate buildings, hospitals, hotels, universities, sports venues, government, industrial, and logistics facilities. SOLiD continuously innovates to deliver best-in-class connectivity solutions that scale to every need. For more information, visit www.solid.com/us.

Cautionary Note About Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains “forward-looking” statements within the meaning of federal securities laws. Forward-looking statements include, among others, statements concerning or implying future financial performance, anticipated product performance and functionality of our products or products incorporating our products, and industry trends and growth opportunities affecting MaxLinear, in particular statements relating to the partnership between MaxLinear and SOLiD, statements relating to MaxLinear’s Sierra, O-RAN RUs or MaxLIN solutions, including but not limited to, with respect to anticipated growth in the potential market opportunities for the Open RAN market, and the functionality, performance and the benefits of use of such products, and statements by MaxLinear’s Vice President of Wireless Infrastructure BU. These forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from any future results expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements. We cannot predict whether or to what extent these new and existing products will affect our future revenues or financial performance. Forward-looking statements are based on management’s current, preliminary expectations and are subject to various risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements may contain words such as “will be,” “will,” “expected,” “anticipate,” “continue,” or similar expressions and include the assumptions that underlie such statements. The following factors, among others, could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements: risks relating to the partnership between MaxLinear and SOLiD, risks relating to the development, testing, and commercial introduction of new products and product functionalities; risks relating to our terminated merger with Silicon Motion and related arbitration and class action complaint and the risks related to potential payment of damages; the effect of intense and increasing competition; impacts of global economic conditions; the cyclical nature of the semiconductor industry; a significant variance in our operating results and impact on volatility in our stock price, and our ability to sustain our current level of revenue, which has previously declined, and/or manage future growth effectively, and the impact of excess inventory in the channel on our customers’ expected demand for certain of our products and on our revenue; the geopolitical and economic tensions among the countries in which we conduct business; increased tariffs, export controls or imposition of other trade barriers; our ability to obtain or retain government authorization to export certain of our products or technology; risks associated with international geopolitical and military conflicts; risks related to the loss of, or a significant reduction in orders from major customers; costs of legal proceedings or potential violations of regulations; information technology failures; a decrease in the average selling prices of our products; failure to penetrate new applications and markets; development delays and consolidation trends in our industry; inability to make substantial research and development investments; delays or expenses caused by undetected defects or bugs in our products; substantial quarterly and annual fluctuations in our revenue and operating results; failure to timely develop and introduce new or enhanced products; order and shipment uncertainties; failure to accurately predict our future revenue and appropriately budget expenses; lengthy and expensive customer qualification processes; customer product plan cancellations; failure to maintain compliance with government regulations; failure to attract and retain qualified personnel; any adverse impact of rising interest rates on us, our customers, and our distributors and related demand; risks related to compliance with privacy, data protection and cybersecurity laws and regulations; risks related to conforming our products to industry standards; risks related to business acquisitions and investments; claims of intellectual property infringement; our ability to protect our intellectual property; risks related to security vulnerabilities of our products; use of open source software in our products; and failure to manage our relationships with, or negative impacts from, third parties.

Market Information

This press release contains statistical data, estimates, and forecasts that are based on independent industry publications or other publicly available information. This information involves many assumptions and limitations, and you are cautioned not to give undue weight to such information. We have not independently verified the accuracy or completeness of the information contained in the industry publications and other publicly available information. Accordingly, we make no representations as to the accuracy or completeness of that information nor do we undertake to update such information after the date of this press release.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250227662488/en/

MaxLinear, Inc. Press Contact:

Debbie Brandenburg

Sr. Marketing Communications Manager

Tel: +1 669.265.6083

[email protected]

KEYWORDS: Europe Spain United States North America California

INDUSTRY KEYWORDS: Semiconductor IOT (Internet of Things) Technology Mobile/Wireless Software 5G Hardware

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SOLiD selects MaxLinear’s Sierra Radio SoC for Next-Gen 5G Open Radio Access Network Radio Units. (Graphic: Business Wire)

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