I am sure many of you already know what Picocom is. But for those who don’t know and can’t get what the topic is about, here are a few basic details.
It is generally used when developing an embedded Linux-based product. As Picocom is a dumb-terminal emulation program that is great for accessing a serial port-based Linux console.
It is also important to first know about Minicom Linux. Minicom, technically, is a text-based, serial port communication program. It is normally used to talk with external devices like Phones, routers, and serial console ports.
Using Picocom in Linux is easy enough; once you get habituated to using them on a daily basis. The use of Picocom is to communicate to a serial device.
We evolved by starting with 1G in 1991, leading to 5G in 2016. It’s quite astonishing to look back now and see how much everything changed. 5G became the new future.
But none of them can be really of any use without RAN, Radio Access Network. It is part of the telecommunication system that connects our devices to other parts of a network via radio connections. It resides between our devices, like mobile, computer, laptop, tablet, etc, and its core network. But ever since the mobile networks started evolving, RAN had to evolve with them, which bought upon a new 5G RAN with advanced capabilities than the old RAN standards. 5G RANs are still in an early stage, but that doesn’t stop the other countries, as there was a recent report saying that 5G coverage reached nearly 75% of the United States population.
With all this going on, It is a piece of big news indeed, knowing that Picocom announced to launch the first-ever 5G O-RAN chip, PC802 SoC. Picocom being known as the 5G O-RAN baseband specialist is the understatement of the century.
This device is reckoned to empower a whole new breed of 5G NR open small cell products. An interesting fact here is that the PC802 is the world’s first-ever 4G/5G which is entirely dedicated to developing small cells with integrated support to be able to reach up to O-RAN standards.
It is designed so that it could support disaggregated 5G small cell platforms, including indoor networks like residential, industrial, and enterprise, and also the outdoor networks.
It is a purpose-designed PHY SoC which is JUST for 5G NR/LTE small cell disaggregated and also for integrated RAN architectures, that specifically includes support for 4G. The SoC also includes support for industry-leading Open RAN specifications. It has an interface with a layer 2/3 stack via the SCF FAPI interface over PCIe.
This PC802chip can be used in various devices, like in integrated small cells, Split 2 and 6 disaggregated small cells, split 7.2X O-RAN Distributed Units(DU) and Remote Units(RU), and also various new or upcoming platforms with various splits(as long as the platforms in question are compatible with the chip).
This chip also supports 3GPP 5GNR releases 15 and 16 and is also designed to be flexible for future releases. Not to mention, it also supports simultaneous 5GNR/LTE mode, has super flexible multi-RAT, multi-carrier component configurations, and also Dynamic Spectrum Sharing (DSS) support.
You can also visit its official site for more details and to browse through its various products.
