Altera's CPRI v4.1 IP core for wireless base station and remote radio head design

SAN JOSE, USA: Altera Corp. today announced the availability of its Common Public Radio Interface (CPRI) v4.1 intellectual property (IP) core.

Supporting channel speeds up to 6.144 Gbps, the CPRI v4.1 IP core supports the LTE and WiMAX standards and offers legacy support for WCDMA, CDMA and other air-interface standards in a single system.

It enables developers to easily upgrade from proprietary CPRI implementations to a highly configurable solution supporting today's standards, improving customer productivity and cost of ownership.

This fully configurable, off-the-shelf solution complements Altera's 40-nm portfolio of Arria II GX FPGAs for up to 3.072G CPRI line rates and Stratix IV GX FPGAs and HardCopy IV ASIC solutions for up to 6.144G CPRI line rates.

The IP core targets a wide range of wireless applications including multi-mode air-interface support, single-hop and multi-hop system topologies and advanced MIMO antenna configurations.

It comes complete with test benches that perform start-up sequences for common configuration modes so developers can get up to speed quickly and focus on differentiating their product.

“There is an increasing demand from our customers worldwide to provide off-the-shelf solutions for implementing common functions in wireless basestations,” said Arun Iyengar, senior director of Altera's broadcast and communications business units.

“The Altera CPRI IP core enables customers to minimize design efforts and accelerate time to market for standards-based radio access products while still retaining the ability to customize for the unique requirements of their applications. With increasing demand for bandwidth in the CPRI links, this core combined with our transceiver technology solidly positions OEMs to address future basestation requirements including 10-Gbps CPRI links.”

The Altera CPRI v4.1 IP core includes key features such as:

* Built-in support for CPRI v4.1 and backward compatible mapping methods.
* Line rate support up to 6.144 Gbps requiring a clock rate as low as 153.6 MHz to ease timing closure.
* Up to 24 antenna carriers per IP core.
* Integrated 10/100 Ethernet MAC and HDLC controllers.

“We are pleased that Altera has selected our CPRI v4.1 IP technology to expand their IP portfolio offering,” said Christian Lanzani, senior product manager in Radiocomp ApS. “This technology is the most compact, flexible and in-the-field fully verified CPRI interface solution available for distributed base stations.”

This new CPRI v4.1 core adds to Altera's broad portfolio of wireless basestation technology including IP, reference designs and DSP Builder tool support for creating optimized digital downconverters (DDC), digital upconverters (DUC), crest factor reduction (CFR), digital predistortion (DPD), and other functions.

The CPRI v4.1 core is available either in encrypted IP or as source code for complete user control.