Blue Wonder to develop LTE baseband IP using Tensilica dataplane processors

SANTA CLARA, USA: Tensilica Inc. announced that Blue Wonder Communications, of Dresden, Germany, has licensed Tensilica's Xtensa dataplane processors (DPUs) for an LTE embedded broadband modem design.

Blue Wonder Communications is an independent design house developing mobile broadband solutions for the telecommunications and semiconductor industries. Many of the employees at Blue Wonder Communications previously were employed by NXP's wireless division and have extensive expertise in high-data-rate wireless design.

"New design approaches are needed to successfully implement the LTE and LTE Advanced standards," stated Dr. Peter Meyer, managing director and head of development at Blue Wonder Communications.

"The traditional approach of using hardwired logic for the performance-intensive PHY layer datapath simply won't work. Because LTE systems run at such high data rates, it would require millions of gates of logic developed with RTL (register transfer level) methods -- and that creates a huge verification hurdle.

"Using Tensilica's automated processor creation tools we are able to quickly generate customized DPUs delivering the performance levels of custom hardware with the programmability of a processor."

"Blue Wonder Communications, with its expertise in high-speed, low power mobile broadband modems, is slated to become a major player in LTE modem semiconductor IP licensing," stated Mahesh Venkatraman, Tensilica's vice president of marketing, vertical segments.

"Blue Wonder Communication's design team fully realizes the benefits of customizing Tensilica's DPUs to meet the requirements of LTE and LTE Advanced handset designs, with requirements for 20-to-150-times the efficiency on a much lower power budget than current 3G designs."

Tensilica offers a variety of solutions for baseband communications applications. For designs with a software-centric architecture, Tensilica offers several optimized DSP (digital signal processors) architectures under the ConnX DSP family label, including the recently announced ConnX Baseband Engine.

For designs with a more hardware-centric approach, Tensilica's customizable dataplane processors are the ideal building block for creating high-performance highly-optimized functional blocks with the performance equivalent to hardwired logic pared with the flexibility of programmable processors.