Austin, Texas-based Freescale Semiconductor has rolled out "base station-on-chip" products built on its QorIQ Qonverge multimode platform.
Freescale’s first available QorIQ Qonverge processors include the PSC9130/31 femtocell SoCs, for eight to 16 simultaneous users, and PSC9132 picocell/enterprise SoC devices, for up to 100 simultaneous users.
The new QorIQ Qonverge PSC9132 system-on-chip (SoC) for picocell and PSC9130/31 SoCs for femtocell base stations come with a single architecture that support multiple air interfaces, providing operators and OEMs with integrated heterogeneous offerings that help minimise power consumption, cost and design time, the company claimed.
The QorIQ Qonverge wireless base station processor portfolio offers processors built on the same architecture that is suited for small- to large-cell base stations.
The platform allows OEMs to reuse software regardless of cell size, where customers can leverage common hardware, software architecture and tools to leverage applications that help speed time to market.
The processors support a range of air interfaces, including LTE (FDD/TDD), WCDMA (HSPA+), WiMAX, UMTS and CDMA.
The devices also feature glueless RFIC communication and antennae interfaces, eliminating the need for additional chips such as FPGAs and reduce board space and cost.
The ultra-integrated PSC913x family also provides support for GPS synchronisation and 2G/3G sniffing in a single device.
Citing that the wireless industry is in need of new products to address power requirements and surging demand for additional bandwidth, Freescale’s QorIQ Qonverge portfolio offers new SoCs for customers, as they move up to larger capacity systems.
The QorIQ Qonverge processors are built on Freescale’s Power Architecture cores, programmable StarCore digital signal processor (DSP) technology and baseband hardware acceleration engines already deployed in multiple LTE macrocell base stations around the world.
Leveraging StarCore SC3850 DSP and Power Architecture e500 MPU cores, the new QorIQ Qonverge SoCs can offload Layer 2 processing and above to MPU cores instead of DSP cores.
The PSC9131 reference design board, planned for availability in Q4 2011, incorporates the processors, memory interfaces and most peripheral functions.
The PSC9132 QorIQ Qonverge development system, planned for availability in Q4 2011, offers an efficient computing evaluation, development and test platform.
