Freescale and TI shrink base station onto a chip
The two baseband majors join base station SoC game, and go head-to-head for LTE
Published: 15 February, 2011
READ MORE: Texas Instruments | Freescale | Semiconductor | LTE
Mobile World Congress is not just the site of the battle of the multicore mobile processors. Another key silicon war is grabbing attention - the race to shrink the base station onto a chip. This has been done for years by femtocell specialists like Picochip, and firms like Mindspeed have addressed slightly larger formats, but now the baseband giants Freescale and Texas Instruments are both unveiling their system-on-chip architectures.
Freescale's new QorIQ Qonverge platform has already gained prominence as a key element of Alcatel-Lucent's new lightRadio project to deconstruct the mobile network. It crams all the functions of a base station onto a single SoC, which can then be used to power any form factor from femtocell to macrocell. Within the chip, Freescale has integrated multiple cores, each dedicated to various digital signal and communications processing functions, plus baseband and security acceleration.
Lisa Su, SVP of Freescale's Networking and Multimedia Group, told ConnectedPlanet:
"Usually technologies come from a lot of different sources and they're not designed to work together. Several years ago, we came to the conclusion that this was not the most efficient way to build a baseband system." She said firms like Picochip have blazed the trail, but that Freescale would make its impact by extending the concept to macro base stations that support thousands of users and all the main air interfaces.
It is also targeting Picochip's femtocell heartland though, and there are four levels of QorIQ for different cell sizes - macro, metro/micro (hundreds of users), pico and femto. Alcatel-Lucent is using the top end version, while Airvana is to use the smallest for a new line of LTE and multimode picocells and femtos.
Not to be outdone, Texas Instruments is offering a multimode base station chip, the snappily named TMS320TCI668, delivering "double the LTE performance of any existing 40nm SoC". It achieves this by adding hardware accelerators to the company's recently announced base station SoC, the TCI6616, which uses a new DSP design, in which every core handles both floating point and fixed point math for higher performance and flexibility. The aim is to use spectrum more efficiently by freeing up the programmable DSP cores for tasks that affect the customer experience, like scheduling and MIMO. TI says the new SoC enables gains of "up to 40% spectral efficiency."
While Freescale integrates its own network processor into its platform, TI's offering has a separate ARM processor for now. This will be fully integrated later this year, but as an interim step, to encourage developers to start work, TI will offer a 3G/4G small cell platform combining the TCI6616 SoC for PHY and Layer 2 processing with Axcom's C6A8167 Integra DSP+ARM processor for Layer 3 processing.
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