Jio, NXP collaborate to expand 5G use cases in India

In a bid to accelerate its 5G efforts in India, Reliance Industries’ subsidiary Jio Platforms has announced a collaboration with Dutch chipmaker NXP Semiconductors. 

Under the agreement, a statement said, Jio and NXP plan to develop, test, implement a 5G NR O-RAN small cell solution incorporating NXP’s Layerscape family of multicore processors. 

The combined solution, NXP said, will power Jio’s new radio access networks (RAN) capable of delivering high performance 5G and enabling a wide range of use-cases for broadband access as well as Industry 4.0 and IoT applications such as tele-medicine, tele-education, augmented/virtual reality, and smart homes. 

NXP’s Layerscape multicore processors use a combination of ARM 64-bit cores, networking and security offload engines with high-speed SerDes interfaces.  

In tests, these chips enabled Jio’s 5G NR (new radio) solutions to deliver peak data rates of over 1 Gbps at 100 MHz channel bandwidth in 3.5 GHz spectrum. 

“The NXP processor platform is an important component of Jio’s 5G journey. 5G New Radio solutions require flexibility in terms of the platform features, efficiency and rich tooling, which NXP brings to the table,” Aayush Bhatnagar, senior vice president of Jio Platforms, said in the statement. 

“Along with NXP, Jio Platforms has developed state-of-the art radio products, which are compliant to the 3GPP as well as to the O-RAN standards,” he added. 

The partnership comes just a few days after Jio Platforms’ collaboration with Google Cloud, aimed at building 5G solutions for enterprise and consumer segments.   

While announcing the engagement at RIL’s 44th AGM, Mukesh Ambani, chairman and managing director of the conglomerate, said, “Jio will use Google Cloud to power Jio’s 5G solutions and for internal needs of key Reliance growth businesses like Reliance Retail, JioMart, JioSaavn and JioHealth.” 

The company remains confident to be the first to launch a full-fledged 5G service in India, he added.