S receiver and Phase Locked Loop (PLL) infrastructure, or a GPS unit that provides a timing source to the fronthaul Network Interface Card (NIC). Fronthaul and backhaul IO. Although theoretically speaking, all processing can be done in software in a server platform, the amount of processing power required is more than (Telecom) Server Accelerator Cards DIMMs GPS Antenna Timing Storage To RUs Fronthaul Server PHY offload To CU/Core 10/25GE NIC GbE/10GbE Management FIGURE 4-8 Server-based cell site DU solution. Chapter 4 Hardware architecture choices supported in a cost-effective manner. One solution is to provide hardware offload for components of the processing chain. For example, a "smart Network Interface Card" (SmartNIC) can offload mid- or backhaul traffic, including the IP/IPSec and GTP encapsulation, offloading the host processor from implementing these functions. Given that the server System-On-Chip (SoC) itself is typically limited on integrated Ethernet interfaces (instead relying on external devices for Ethernet IO), this offload is an obvious candidate. A SmartNIC typically uses a dedicated networking processor (from vendors like Cavium/Marvell, Netronome or NXP) or FPGA (Altera/Intel or Xilinx/AMD) to implement the offloaded protocol stacks on dedicated engines that are more power and cost efficient than the server they are plugged into. The programmability of the SmartNIC allows it to be upgraded to support custom features, at the cost of design, implementation, verification and optimization of this firmware. High throughput fronthaul traffic can be offloaded through an eCPRI NIC that takes care of the full Control and User plane components of the fronthaul specifications, transferring uncompressed IQ buffers to/from the host processor and offloading the CPU from doing these functions. This NIC can be physically the same smartNIC or one that is optimized for eCPRI. Forward Error Correction and associated Physical Layer Acceleration targets to offload the host CPU even more by taking the most processo