External transceiver over QLink.

I know the LTE modems had ADCs and DACs in SoC - ZIF with analog signal running straight between the tuner and the SoC. But 5G systems rolled ADC/DAC into the transceiver chip itself - with only the digital processing living in SoC.

Is the "QLink" setup they use in 5G systems now just a thin protocol running over LVDS and streaming I/Q between the transceiver and SoC DSP as digital signals?

Never actually went that far, but I did wonder if you could plug a QLink tuner chip into an FPGA to use it as a broadband SDR frontend.

There are also chips like NXP layerscape which do the sampling and hardware acceleration on a chip which streams to host (though still need another transceiver).

The motivation for this is of course beamforming, angle of arrival, spatial streaming, etc. You connect multiple antennas with different views back to the base station.