The new platform unites the company’s Virtex-5 or Virtex-6 family of field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) with Wintegra’s WinPath-2 or WinPath-3 family of the access packet processors and software to offer a complete digital baseband and transport solution for the 4G radio standards, incorporating both time division duplex (TDD) and frequency division duplex (FDD) modes of the LTE. It offers superior flexibility for both channel cards and the network interface transport cards to address the full range of basestation (eNodeB) implementations from the enterprise femtocells to multi-sector macro basestation form factors. The crucial aspect of standards compliance is addressed in partnership with Agilent Technologies Inc. (Agilent).
Wintegra is excited to be working with Xilinx on this important LTE program, stated Michael Phillip, senior vice president (VP) and general manager of Wireless Systems at Wintegra. We share the common goal of reducing time to market for wireless infrastructure developers by providing open solutions that provide significant differentiation opportunities for our customers. This platform draws upon the respective strengths of each company to deliver tremendous value in terms of integration, scalability, and flexibility for LTE product development.
The company and Wintegra are demonstrating the LTE baseband TDP at Mobile World Congress 2009 in Barcelona from February 16 to February 19, 2009 in their respective booths (Xilinx Booth #E47/Hall 1 and Wintegra Booth #HS97/Hall 3.1).
Cost-Power Optimized Design:
The solution to cost and power savings is the reduction in number of devices in the basestation. The LTE baseband TDP unites multiple baseband and transport functions into fewer devices, including all the physical layer (PHY), media access control (MAC), and the network and air interface security and encryption functions, and also an optional Common Public Radio Interface serializer/deserializer (CPRI SERDES).
Collaboration with Wintegra is integral to our roadmap for delivering an end-to-end LTE basestation design encompassing radio, baseband, MAC, and transport functions. Wintegra’s development team has been particularly helpful and allowed us to implement a very efficient coupling between the MAC and PHY layers, which is critical to meeting the latency requirements of LTE applications, stated Dean Westman, VP of communications solutions marketing at Xilinx.
The software-defined nature of platform allows basestation developers to future-proof their products for rapidly evolving world of cellular communications. The open framework facilitates integration of the custom intellectual property components allowing developers to differentiate their products. The reprogrammable and the reconfigurable architecture of the new platform also make it possible for the operators to undertake field software upgrades without the expensive hardware improvements or the replacement programs.
In addition, the processing headroom offered by the company’s FPGA-based physical layer opens road to LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) technologies and integration of more complex, differentiating baseband algorithms, like turbo equalization, baseband PAPR, and the 4×4 MIMO decode. The Wintegra processor offers all MAC functionality, all network transport capabilities, ands also embedded support for both over-the-air and network encryption standards, incorporating PDCP, robust header compression (RoHC) and encryption standards, like Snow3G, Kasumi, AES and IPSec.
Integrated Test and Verification:
Provisions are included in the new platform for monitoring standards compliance at the multiple points all through system development using the Agilent VSA software. The flexibility of VSA software allows validation of baseband development at both a pure software model level during design concept phase and later using digitized signals from the company’s baseband development board during implementation phase. With the broad analysis of LTE signals offered by the software, design engineers can assess and troubleshoot the early prototype LTE transport, MAC and PHY designs, while maintaining conformance to the LTE specifications when implementing changes.
Agilent is fully committed to addressing the complete functionality and performance test requirements that engineers need to create high-quality products for the LTE market, said Guy Sene, VP and general manager of Agilent’s Signal Analysis Division. These advances in testing for both LTE Node B infrastructure and UE designs will significantly contribute to the market delivery of this innovative technology.
