Radio unit hardware built around the O-RAN 7.2x split — FPGA or SoC lower PHY with the digital front end integrated, RF transceiver chain, power amplifier, fronthaul interface and the timing that lets a TDD network coexist with its neighbours. Board-level engineering, not a licensable core: the thing that ships to a site and has to survive there.
The radio unit is where deployment economics concentrate. It is replicated across every site, it contains the power amplifier, and its efficiency is a recurring operating cost rather than a one-off capital number. Everything in the platform is arranged around that.
The 7.2x split places lower PHY and RF in the radio unit and everything above it in the distributed unit, connected over an open fronthaul interface. That choice keeps the radio unit tractable while keeping fronthaul bandwidth affordable at high antenna counts — and it fixes what this hardware must contain.
The platform is delivered as a design rather than a catalogue part: band plan, antenna count, output power and mechanical envelope are set by the deployment, and those four decisions determine the thermal design, the supply architecture and the enclosure before any component is chosen.
| Parameter | Detail |
|---|---|
| Split | O-RAN 7.2x, lower PHY and RF in the radio unit |
| Digital front end | CFR and DPD integrated, not bolted on |
| Fronthaul | eCPRI over optical, with the timing accuracy the split requires |
| Timing | GNSS discipline with IEEE 1588 and SyncE, for TDD boundary agreement |
| Configurations | Small cell 2T2R and 4T4R, massive MIMO arrays, macro |
| Processing | FPGA or SoC, chosen against volume and reconfigurability needs |
| Environment | Outdoor enclosure, thermal design sized to amplifier dissipation |
| Delivery | Board design, integration and bring-up, with the DFE licensable separately |
Maturity — silicon-proven, FPGA-validated or RTL stage — is confirmed at enquiry for the specific configuration you need, rather than claimed generically here.
Send the target node, the interface requirements and the integration context. If this is not the right fit, that will be said early rather than discovered at integration.
The radio unit in an Open RAN deployment using the 7.2x functional split, which places lower physical-layer processing and the RF chain in the radio unit and everything above it in the distributed unit, connected over an open fronthaul interface.
Hardware. The O-RAN radio unit IP and the 5G digital front end are separately licensable cores; this is the board-level platform that carries them, together with the RF chain, amplifier, fronthaul interface, timing and enclosure.
In time-division duplex, every site must agree on when the transmit and receive boundaries fall. Get it wrong and a transmission arrives while a neighbour is still receiving — so the symptom appears in someone else's network. GNSS discipline with IEEE 1588 and SyncE is what keeps that agreement.
The power amplifier. It dominates dissipation, and the enclosure, heatsinking and mechanical envelope are sized to it — which is also why digital pre-distortion is a thermal decision as much as a spectral one.
Tell us the specification, the constraint and the deadline. Programmes that cross silicon, radio, embedded and AI are where Faststream is strongest.