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Remote Radio Unit (RRU)

A remote radio unit (RRU), commonly referred to as a Remote Radio Head (RRH), is a transceiver that you'll find on wireless base stations. These transceivers connect wireless devices with wireless networks. RRUs have become one of the most important subsystems of today's new distributed base stations. The RRU contains the base station's RF circuitry plus analog-to-digital/digital-to-analog converters and up/down converters, and connects to, and thus drives the base station's antenna. In a wireless network, the RRU is responsible for transmitting and receiving radio signals between the base station and mobile devices. It also performs various signal processing tasks such as amplification, filtering, and modulation/demodulation. In a Mobile Base Station, one or multiple Remote Radio Units are connected to the Baseband Unit through an optoelectronic link. Thus, the use of RRUs allows for greater flexibility and scalability in wireless network deployments, as they can be easily installed and configured to support different frequencies and deployment scenarios. Additionally, the RRUs are the main contributors for Mobile network power consumption and crucial to run efficiently.

Key challenges

Remote radio unit designers often need to manage the following aspects:

  • Energy efficiency to reduce the remote radio unit and site consumption
  • Scalability in ensuring that the RRU can scale to support multiple frequency bands and new deployment scenarios to meet the growing demand for mobile services.
  • Increasing compute independently of deployment scenario such as traditional, O-RAN, or edge compute architecture while minimizing latency.
  • Reliable Security functions, the RRUs must be designed to prevent unauthorized access and protect against cyber-attacks.

Our products and solutions

ST answers these challenges by providing a wide range of innovative products to the market.

Our offering includes an extensive range of microcontrollers and microprocessors equipped with a set of hardware peripherals and software development tools.
 STs secure solutions include a family of products in a complete ecosystem to support authentication, secure connection establishment, secure boot and firmware upgrade, and trusted network access.

ST provide a complete power devices portfolio including IGBTs, Thyristors, power Rectifiers and MOSFETs, Power Modules and System-in-Package (SiP) solutions to making Remote Radio Units more energy-efficient.

In addition, our broad range of inertial and environmental MEMS sensors can also make Remote Radio Units smarter.

We offer our selected customers a range of different technologies suitable for telecom applications like RF-SOI, BiCMOS and FDSOI and derivates of these utilizing our COT (Customer Owned Tooling) business model.