We’re excited to share details of something we’ve been working on in partnership with SiFive, which pairs Lime Microsystems’ field-programmable RF (FPRF) with SiFive’s Freedom U500 platform. The project is to establish the foundations for a radically open wireless base station architecture with unprecedented flexibility.

The combination creates a platform where wireless systems are implemented via software-defined radio, with the ability for custom hardware accelerators to be integrated in FPGA, before progressing to a customised ASIC once their design has been validated.

This fundamental flexibility across both baseband processing and RF will make it possible to bring high-performance radio access network solutions — e.g., for LTE, NB-IoT, and 5G — to market far quicker than ever before and at greatly reduced cost.

The short video below walks through the current lab hardware setup and we’ll be sharing details of our progress in due course.

Andrew and the LimeNET Team