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DCMS Announce 15 UK Consortia-Led Projects to Deliver Open-RAN as Part of a £36m Investment to Support Telecom Supply Chain Diversification

14th December 2021

Last week, Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport (DCMS) announced 15 UK consortia-led projects to deliver Open-RAN (radio access networks) as part of a £36m investment to support telecom supply chain diversification, click here for the results.

CSA Catapult is pleased to play a central role in two of the projects:

  • In the first project (ORanGaN), CSA Catapult will work with partners INEX, CIL and Viper RF to develop a sovereign UK supply chain, manufacturing processes, and packaging solutions, for radio frequency gallium nitride (RF-GaN) devices which are critical to 5G communications systems electronics hardware.
  • In the second project, CSA Catapult will work with partners Lime Microsystems, Slipstream Engineering and Arquit to develop a novel modular platform able to output powers of up to 10W (initially) using a new Software Defined Radio (SDR) chip able to operate up to 10GHz coupled with a very efficient, wideband power amplifier. As well as developing a more flexible and scalable platform the team will also integrate a new security layer based on Arqit’s QuantumCloud™ platform that will provide security by default in the operation of the system by using stronger, simpler encryption that is unbreakable – even with a quantum computer.

These projects accelerate the deployment of secure 5G support telecom diversification and improve network efficiency while building resilient UK supply chains for compound semiconductor. They employ the latest techniques in software defined radio, enabling better spectrum management and spectrum splicing in future.

Congratulations to the other project winners, this is a great result for UK future telecom networks.

Click here to read the official announcement from DCMS.

Click here to learn more about the competition.