A University spin-out company, AccelerComm Ltd, was established to design specialist hardware accelerators based on this research, with a focus on enabling 5G technologies. To date the company offers 16 accelerator design products, which are enabling its customers to innovate and make their communications systems faster and more energy efficient. Following partnerships and licensing agreements with several organisations including Intel, Xilinx and National Instruments, hardware accelerators based on AccelerComm’s designs are being deployed in devices, base-stations and test-and-measurement equipment around the world.
This stream of research is also facilitating the wider deployment of 5G through the development of open-source simulation models. These have been adapted and used by researchers and industry experts around the world to confirm their products comply with 5G standards. The models have also contributed to other open-source initiatives, such as O-RAN Alliance and the Data Plane Development Kit, enabling the 'integration in a day' of base-station hardware accelerators. This will allow the technology to be deployed in a greater variety of base-station scenarios, from rural deployments with wide coverage, to individual street-level deployments with ultra-fast connectivity, to deployments in sporting stadiums with capacity for tens of thousands of simultaneous connections.
In addition, Southampton expertise in this area is informing industry standards and government policy. Rob led a consortium including Ericsson, LG Electronics, Orange, NEC and Sony that defined the hardware-accelerated signal processing aspects of the global standard for 5G mobile communication. He also contributed to part of the UK government's Future Telecoms Infrastructure Review, which sets the flagship policy for the roll-out of 5G in the UK, with the target of providing 5G coverage to the majority of the UK population by 2027.