- Highly integrated Radio System-on-Chip (SoC) accelerates Open RAN Radio Unit (O-RU) development with reduced size, weight, power, cooling, and cost.
CARLSBAD, CA – (BUSINESS WIRE) October 7, 2025 – MaxLinear, Inc. (Nasdaq: MXL) a leading provider of wireless infrastructure solutions, today announced that Pegatron 5G has selected Sierra, the company’s single-chip Radio SoC, for their next generation PR2850 5G Macro Open RAN Radio Unit (O-RU). Pegatron is a global technology leader focusing on O-RAN-compliant solutions.
The PR2850 is Pegatron 5G’s latest carrier-grade 5G Macro O-RU designed for Open RAN deployments. Purpose-built for performance and flexibility, the PR2850 combines high output power, TDD and FDD multi-band support, and advanced MIMO capabilities. Enabled by MaxLinear’s Sierra Radio SoC, the PR2850 is a high-performance macro radio in an ultra-compact form factor with low power consumption. This balance of performance, efficiency, and size positions Pegatron 5G as a key partner in accelerating the global adoption of open, intelligent, and sustainable 5G networks. Pegatron will showcase the PR2850 at the upcoming India Mobile Congress 2025 (IMC 2025) in New Delhi from October 8 to 11 – Hall 1, stand #D10.
Sierra is an innovative Radio SoC that flexibly supports all major RU applications including traditional macro, massive MIMO, pico, and all-in-one small cells. Sierra integrates multiple sub-systems into a single chip, providing a complete software-programmable radio signal processing engine for O-RUs:
- Radio Frequency (RF) transceiver supporting up to 8 transmitters, 8 receivers, and 2 feedback receivers
- Digital Front End (DFE) with digital pre-distortion (DPD), crest factor reduction (CFR), and passive intermodulation (PIM) cancellation
- Low-PHY baseband processor supporting 5G, 4G, and NB-IoT air interfaces
- O-RAN Alliance Split 7.2x fronthaul interface
“Close collaboration between Pegatron 5G and MaxLinear dramatically accelerated the development of our new PR2850 5G Macro O-RU,” said CY Feng, General Manager of Pegatron Communication Products Business Group. “Sierra’s highly efficient PA linearization technology coupled with its superior system integration and flexibility enabled us to deliver highly competitive RUs with compact size and low power consumption. We’re grateful for MaxLinear’s technical support, which helped us accelerate our time to market.”
“MaxLinear is proud to support Pegatron 5G in our ongoing cooperation,” said Puneet Sethi, Vice President of MaxLinear’s Network Infrastructure & Carrier BU. “Sierra empowered Pegatron 5G’s development teams to rapidly and cost-effectively build high-performance Open Ran radio platforms. Sierra levels the playing field for Pegatron 5G to dramatically accelerate their deployment of cutting-edge Open RAN radios with global operators.”
About MaxLinear’s Sierra Radio SoC Solution
Sierra’s RF transceiver uses a low-power wide-band Zero-IF (ZIF) architecture and supports 8 transmitters (TX) and 8 receivers (RX) with 2 feedback receivers (FBRX). Each RX supports wide signal bandwidths up to 400MHz and each TX and FBRX supports signal bandwidths up to 900MHz. It can operate in 8T8R single-band or 2 x 4T4R multi-band configurations.
The digital front-end (DFE) integrates digital pre-distortion (DPD), crest factor reduction (CFR), passive intermodulation cancellation (PIMC), digital up conversion (DUC), and digital down conversion (DDC) blocks. MaxLinear's proprietary DPD/CFR technology, MaxLIN™, linearizes power amplifiers (PA) up to 400MHz of occupied bandwidth and dramatically improves PA energy efficiency while meeting spectral emission masks with margin. The PIMC block cancels passive intermodulation products in the uplink paths to improve receiver sensitivity and relax the specification of expensive RF filters. The DUC/DDC supports up to eight component carriers per transmit and receive path.
The Low-PHY baseband processor supports 4G, 5G, and NB-IoT air interfaces, including uplink PRACH processing. It is software configurable for different modes and parameters including dynamic spectrum sharing (DSS), bandwidth parts, mixed numerology, and windowing.
Sierra supports an O-RAN fronthaul Split Option 7.2x Category A interface with up to four 10 or 25Gbit/s Ethernet interfaces.
Sierra integrates an embedded CPU for system control. The CPU is an integrated quad-core Arm® A53 processor with Neon™ extensions. Each Arm® core has 1MB of internal SRAM and has access to an additional 8GB of external DRAM through a DDR controller.
For more information on Sierra RF Radio SoC or MaxLIN DPD linearization technology, visit: About MaxLinear, Inc.
MaxLinear, Inc. (Nasdaq: MXL) is a leading provider of RF, analog, digital, and mixed-signal integrated circuits for access and connectivity, wired and wireless infrastructure, and industrial and multimarket applications. MaxLinear is headquartered in Carlsbad, California.
For more information, please visit https://www.maxlinear.com/
About Pegatron 5G
Pegatron 5G draws on the expertise of PEGATRON, a global leader in electronics manufacturing. Established in 2018, Pegatron 5G focuses on O-RAN-compliant solutions for private networks and industrial transformation. Our product portfolio includes 5G radios, Integrated Small Cells, servers, networking equipment, and CPE devices, leveraging edge computing and network management capabilities.
For more information, please visit https://5g.pegatroncorp.com/
