Green FPGA: The Role of FPGA in Waveform Agnostic Radio Unit for 5G and 6G Applications

This 13-minute conference talk by Munir Ahmad (Compute Architect) and Hossam Fattah (5G Architect) from Lattice Semiconductor Corp explores how FPGAs enable waveform agnostic Radio Units (RUs) in ORAN architecture. Discover how these adaptable RUs support multiple technologies (4G, 5G, and 6G), providing modularity, scalability, and interoperability benefits for network operators. Learn about the reference hardware architecture implementation featuring host and baseband CPUs, FPGA, and analog RF Frontend, along with the cellular stack integration. The presentation details how the system achieves flexibility through FPGA reconfigurability while maintaining low power consumption and high security. Examine how the architecture supports up to 16T16R MIMO configurations, meets 3GPP specifications, and enables advanced use cases including 5G sidelink and V2X applications.