5 years of heavy lifting and we’re about to tape out our 5th generation chipset! Erez Schwartz, Ceragon’s EVP product, talks to Dr. Dahlit Brin about how Ceragon’s continued commitment to investing in leading edge technology helps close a technology gap and enables our wireless transport solutions to cater to the needs of 5G.
Full interview transcript:
Welcome to the Backhaul Lounge. I'm Dahlit Brin and I'm very excited to talk to you today about the tape out of our new generation chipset. Now I'm joined by Erez Schwartz, who's our EVP Products. Erez, almost five years of R&D, of very hard work, and our new generation chipset is about to be launched, we're all very excited. And so I'd love to hear about everything that went behind this huge undertaking. But the first question that I have is why? Why did we invest in this heavy lifting and in developing yet another generation chipset?
First, Dahlit, thank you for inviting me to the lounge. Yes, we are very close to taping out after almost 5 years of really hard work, our next generation, our 5th generation chipset.
The reason is very simple. The technology spiral and the requirements of the market are growing and growing. And specifically now that we are facing 5G. 5G is just starting, but when 5G will be full-blown, the requirements are going to be very big from performance, bandwidth, and also cost. We want to give our customers the ability to buy great products at affordable cost so they can build their 5G network. And for that we need new chipsets and new technologies to perform this is one leap forward.
Ok, ok, that makes perfect sense. But why don't we just buy something off the shelf? Why do this in-house?
So there are two reasons. The first reason is there are no chips out there that will be able to do even close to what our next generation chipset would do. And the second reason is that our philosophy at Ceragon is that we want to do what we call vertical integration, meaning designing our own systems and designing our own major building blocks and ingredients so that we can control our systems, we can control our future. We know 5G is coming. There's going to be a lot of new things in 5G. We don't know all of what is going to happen there. And we need to be able to tweak ourselves. And for that we need to control the technology. And this is why we are building these components for ourselves.
Ok, so what you're saying, in my own words, is that we have the new requirements of 5G. We're not exactly sure what the future may hold, so we're planning for all possible scenarios. There isn't anything outside the market and we saw that many, many years ago. So we want to make sure that we have the flexibility and that we're prepared for whatever may come our way. And that's why we decided to go for this new chipset.
Now, I am really intrigued to hear about the ins and outs, about what the unique features are, what the benefits are. And you did tell me to hold on a little and you'll talk about this in our next clip. Thank you for now. And this is the Backhaul launch. Stay tuned for part two to hear more about a new generation chipset.
Introducing Ceragon’s revolutionary system-on-a-chip
