Nokia adds Broadcom as third 5G chip vendor to diversify supply

Finland’s Nokia Oyj said on Monday it had partnered with Broadcom to develop chips for 5G equipment in its third such deal following ones with Intel and Marvell .

Nokia initially chose a type of chip — Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) — for its 5G equipment that customers could reprogramme but high costs and supply hurdles last year forced it to change course.

“We still stand by the decision of going with FPGAs because it was the right thing to do at that time,” Sandro Tavares, Nokia’s head of mobile networks marketing, told Reuters. “When we announced the shift in strategy, the market evolved faster and we needed to speed up the process of developing new suppliers,” he said.