Mindspeed 3G/4G/LTE baseband basestation solution uses latest ARM Cortex A9 MPCore in 40nm process technology

NEWPORT BEACH, USA: Mindspeed Technologies Inc., a leading supplier of semiconductor solutions for network infrastructure applications, has used ARM’s latest high-performance, power-efficient ARM Cortex A9 MPCore processor architecture for packet processing in the company’s new Transcede family of wireless baseband processors.

Mindspeed’s Transcede family enables a new class of high-performance, low-power, software-programmable devices that solve the computational challenges presented by next-generation mobile networks.

One of the first devices of its kind to be manufactured in 40-nanometer complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) process technology, Mindspeed’s Transcede 4000 device includes a Quad-MPCore and a Dual-MPCore Cortex A9, which allows the Transcede 4000 to deliver the performance, flexibility and low power consumption required for next-generation mobile basestations.

The device is the first in a planned family of system-on-chip (SoC) solutions that will use the Cortex A9 and support a wide range of processing needs in mobile networks, from femtocells to macrocells, across all required air interface standards, and spanning a wide range of price and performance points.

“The ARM Cortex A9 MPCore is an excellent choice for the Transcede 4000 baseband processor,” said Tom Medrek, senior vice president and general manager of Mindspeed’s Multiservice Access business unit.

“The Cortex A9 delivers industry-leading performance per megahertz while maintaining very low power consumption, and is ideally suited for compute-intensive next-generation mobile network applications. Having the Cortex A9 MPCore co-located on the same SoC as the DSP processors facilitates a very low-latency basestation implementation, perfect for real-time applications over mobile networks such as voice-over-IP and gaming.”

“Mindspeed has been an ARM Partner for many years and their Transcede 4000 baseband processor is the first to include six high-performance Cortex-A9 processors. This solution is both a natural progression and recognition of the enterprise class performance offered with a mobile power profile available with the ARM architecture,” said Ian Drew, EVP marketing, ARM. “This latest deployment of our Cortex-A9 processor further expands ARM’s market reach into enterprise markets like networking and the wireless infrastructure market.”

Mindspeed’s Transcede 4000 family of application-specific baseband processor SoCs combine 48 giga multiplications and accumulations per second (GMACs) of DSP performance with 9000 Dhrystone million instructions per second (DMIPS) of reduced instruction set computer (RISC) processing performance. This processing performance allows the physical and medium access control layers to be co-located on a single SoC, delivering the lowest latency possible.

The Transcede 4000 also delivers a high level of application-specific system integration by including the latest, industry-standard common public radio interface (CPRI) functionality, plus high-speed sRIO and PCI express I/O. On-chip hardware acceleration for forward error correction (FEC) and encryption further reduce the overall system cost.