Small cell base stations packed onto a single chipset are set to help service providers dramatically increase capacity without a parallel increase in cost and power consumption. At Mobile World Congress, Freescale (FSL), LSI (LSI), Texas Instruments (TXN) and Mindspeed (MSPD) are leading the charge toward smaller, cheaper base stations with innovative new products that pack onto one chipset the capability that recently required 20 or more components.
“The result is a 4x bill of materials cost reduction and 3 times less power consumption,” says Freescale’s Scott Aylor when describing his company’s QorIQ Qonverge 4860, the latest addition to Freescale’s suite of semiconductors for base stations. Aylor heads up Freescale’s Wireless Access Division, formed about a year ago. “The market is driving to a more solutions oriented focus,” says Aylor “What you see now is the evolution of that in our products all the way from the new and emergent small cell market all the way to the macro base station.”
The macro base station market is the target for the company’s new QorIQ Qonverge 4860, a 28nm, multistandard, multimode SoC which can accomodate thousands of users and is ready for hetnet and cloud deployments. “You actually can build a farm of these devices in a very small area, a cabinet or whatever,” says Aylor. “If you think of a typical network where you have 10 to 20 macro base stations, they are not all working that hard all the time. The idea behind cloud ran is you centralize that resource and you leverage the ebbs and flows, so you invest less. Our device is quite well suited for that.”
Texas Instruments’ base station on a chip is the first to use the ARM Cortex A15 core, but Freescale claims its offering outperformed TI’s in independent tests. LSI’s solution will also use the ARM core. Mindspeed has teamed up with the Hong Kong Applied Science and Technology Research Institute (ASTRI) to demonstrate what it calls the industry’s first commercial-grade, production-ready time division long-term evolution (TD-LTE) small cell reference design.
While all of these products are expected to make it into actual base stations within the next year or so, Israel’s DesignArt Networks says it already has two customers in field trials and initial service deployments with single-chip LTE base station equipment.
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