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Broadcom has shown off further fruits of last year's acquisition of backhaul chip specialist Provigent, launching a microwave outdoor unit on a chip. It says the BCM85810 combines the functionality of 10 products to improve speeds and efficiency in the microwave aggregation link.

The single-chip offering integrates RF and baseband activities, and can be used to power all-outdoor microwave backhaul units, or split-mount models. It claims to reduce size, cost, complexity and power consumption by integrating the functionality of up to 10 off-the-shelf chips. Broadcom says it will help customers reduce their time to market by using a flexible system-on-chip architecture to support various types of microwave units, including indoor/outdoor and all-outdoor, on a common platform. Just two variants of the 85810 can support all standard point-to-point microwave frequency bands and channel bandwidths, says the chip supplier.

Integrating many components, notably RF and basebands, is the hallmark of many Broadcom wireless platforms, including the SoCs with which it is trying to pressurize Qualcomm in the smartphone market. Dan Charash, general manager of Broadcom's microwave unit, said in a statement: "The introduction of our BCM85810 single chip solution marks the expansion of Broadcom's microwave backhaul portfolio into the RF domain, as we have successfully done in multiple solutions including Wi-Fi, cellular, Bluetooth, and cable modems. The combination of our new RF solutions with our leading baseband solutions delivers a significant reduction in system size, cost and power consumption while dramatically improving system performance."

"No one else is doing SoCs for these kinds of products," added Aviv Ronai, a senior business development manager for Broadcom's networking group. "Typically our competitors are the telecom OEMs themselves, developing their own chips," he told EETimes. "We are trying to convince them our solutions are better and more cost effective."

Late last year, Broadcom announced its first SoC for 4G backhaul systems, based on the Provigent purchase, which also brought Ericsson and Huawei into its customer list. The new RF chip users some of the same unique algorithms seen in that baseband/networking offering, so there are benefits to using both chips together, says Broadcom.

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