  Radio access networks (RAN) are going through a paradigm shift towards
interoperable, intelligent, software-defined, and cloud-native open RAN
solutions. A key challenge towards the adoption and deployment of open RAN at
scale is performance. Hence, it is critical to leverage the power of hardware
acceleration to offload compute-heavy RAN workloads to specialized hardware
devices to enable accelerated compute for open RAN deployments. In this
article, we provide a state-of-the-art overview of hardware acceleration for
open RAN in the fifth generation (5G) wireless networks. We also present a
practical implementation of inline hardware acceleration for open RAN layer 1
processing and identify several areas for future exploration towards the sixth
generation (6G) wireless networks.
