DoCoMo unveils its own MIMO chipsets for LTE
Published: 17 December, 2008
READ MORE: NTT DoCoMo | LTE | Semiconductor
One of the key issues for the operators who claim they want to have LTE in commercial use within a year will be sourcing chips and devices that are standards compliant, and at reasonable cost. A silicon ecosystem takes time to build up, and though Qualcomm has an advanced LTE development roadmap for terminal chipsets, even it has made cautious statements about aligning commercial release to a degree of volume in operator demand. One of the four tier one carriers looking to deploy LTE early, NTT DoCoMo of Japan, may be avoiding the issue by designing its own chips, and says it has developed a chip that supports 100Mbps downlink rates and consumes less than 0.04W of power.
This could be incorporated into DoCoMo's early terminals, expected to be notebooks or dongles, though the carrier will be making the same trade-offs - in terms of its cost base and international roaming capabilities - that it did by moving very early on W-CDMA, with its own semi-standard implementation, FOMA.
The chip has been under development for three years and the first iteration was trialled in September. This supported OFDM and MIMO smart antenna arrays, fundamentals of LTE, and could perform at 200Mbps, but it consumed too much power for a handset and used expensive 4x4 MIMO designs. The new version is in trial but is 'commercially ready', and has cut power consumption by a factor of three. The chip delivers 100Mbps using 2x2 MIMO antennas in a 20MHz band of spectrum. It maximizes reception quality by using Maximum Likelihood Detection (MLD) technology to detect signals from the MIMO antennas even in noisy environments.
DoCoMo said it will incorporate its new LSI chip technology in its own LTE developments and submit its work to international standards activities and the IMT-Advanced program.
The other would-be first movers in LTE are China Mobile and Verizon Wireless, with Vodafone also joining them in trials.
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