The O-DU is the real-time heart of a disaggregated base station — high-PHY, MAC and RLC running inside hard deadlines, terminating the 7.2x fronthaul from the radio and the F1 midhaul to the central unit. It is the most compute-intensive and latency-critical piece of the RAN, and the one most often accelerated.
Between the O-RU and the O-CU. It terminates the 7.2x fronthaul from the radio and runs high-PHY, MAC and RLC in real time, then connects to the O-CU over the F1 midhaul interface. It is the real-time, compute-heavy middle of the disaggregated base station.
Because its high-PHY — forward error correction, modulation, HARQ — runs inside hard microsecond deadlines that general-purpose CPUs struggle to hit deterministically. FPGAs, DSPs or dedicated inline accelerators give the predictable latency the L1 needs, which is exactly the kind of design work we do.
The open fronthaul (7.2x over eCPRI) to the O-RU, the F1 interface to the O-CU, and the E2 interface to the Near-RT RIC. Each is defined by O-RAN/3GPP specifications and has to pass conformance and interoperability testing.
Tell us the specification, the constraint and the deadline.