A joint initiative between three tech companies helped establish a virtualized RAN accelerator solution that officials said is the industry’s first to advance deployment of 5G.

Napatech, a Danish telecom equipment company, is showcasing the technology at Mobile World Congress this week along with U.S. partners Radisys and Xilinx.

The companies developed a system that allows mobile operators to offload networking, cryptography and other compute-intensive operations onto FPGA boards.

That technique, officials said, enables carriers to free up CPU resources on x86 platforms and gain “10x performance for virtualized 5G applications running on standard server platforms and overcome performance bottlenecks.”

The system utilizes Radisys software, Napatech SmartNICs — based on Xilinx FPGAs — and Silex Inside crypto technology to create an “industry-best” platform that “scales from 1G to more than 10G on standard servers.”

“This joint solution … integrates best-of-breed technologies to deliver a true multi-vendor virtualized RAN Accelerator platform that allows mobile operators to rapidly scale 5G service deployments in an NFV environment, while meeting their requirements for performance, power and cost,” Radisys VP Neeraj Patel said in a statement.