An industry first: Freescale Semiconductor unveils innovation at MWC

BARCELONA-In a leap in the infrastructure field, Austin-based Freescale Semiconductor, one of the 10 largest chip makers worldwide, unveiled the industry’s first multimode wireless base station processor family that scales from small to large cells.

The announcement arrived at 6 a.m. on February 14 in Barcelona, Spain at the Mobile World Congress, considered one of the most important conferences globally for the mobile wireless industry.

“It’s really the convergence of all the best technologies that Freescale has to offer in networking,” said Scott Aylor, GM of the Wireless Access Division of Freescale Semiconductor. “We’ve come up with something quite compelling in having a single hardware and software architecture that scales from small cells to large cells.”

The new QorIQ Qonverge portfolio integrates DSP and communications processor technologies to create a true ‘base station-on-chip.’ According to Freescale’s press release, the advanced hybrid multicore technology is the first scalable family of products sharing the same architecture to address multi-standard requirements spanning from small to large cells.

The new product is borne out of the insatiable appetite for smart devices and demand for 4G technologies which have pushed OEMs and carriers to bolster network performance, multiple standards and cell sizes. The QorIQ Qonvege portfolio of base station-on-chip products applies to a new generation of femtocell, picocell, metrocell and macrocell base stations on a common architecture. Advanced process technology and integration allows the new product the convergence of multiple functions traditionally perfomed on separate FPGA, ASIC, DSP and processors to be incorporated on a single device.

This allows for less necessary parts, and the common architecture spanning from femto to macro cells optimizes R&D investments and software reuse, resulting in what Freescale says are lower costs to their clients.

QorIQ Qonverge processors combine several Power Architecture cores and StarCore DSPs with a MAPLE multimode baseband accelerator, packet processing acceleration engines, interconnect fabric and next-node process technology. Standards supported include LTE-FDD & TDD, LTE-Advanced, HSPA+, TD-SCDMA and WiMAX. The architecture also allows for evolving standards with software upgrades.