Dr Clare Somerville is a senior wireless architect at Intel, where she leads a team defining platform enhancements to support 5G base-stations. She joined Intel in 2014 and has over 20 years’ experience across multiple generations of mobile systems. In 2015 and 2019 the Small Cell Forum awarded her for outstanding contributions related to her technical leadership of activities defining 5G FAPI and virtualized small cells.

Prior to Intel Clare spent 10 years at Picochip, where she was responsible for 3G, WiMAX and LTE small cell system architecture. Clare received both her MEng and Ph.D from the University of Southampton.

Within the radio access network (RAN) the physical layer has typically been implemented with custom hardware. However, in 5G the use cases are numerous and diverse and often challenging; services and applications don’t stand still so 5G deployments will also need to evolve over time. This means there are clear benefits if we can have the physical layer processing running on commercial off the shelf servers. This talk will highlight how Intel’s Xeon scalable processors and their ability to run traditional DSP workloads is key to this network transformation.