Aricent, NetLogic Microsystems collaborate on LTE eNodeB solutions

AMSTERDAM, THE NETHERLANDS: Aricent, a global innovation, technology and services company focused exclusively on communications and NetLogic Microsystems Inc. have announced development collaboration aimed at enabling advanced Long Term Evolution (LTE) capabilities on NetLogic Microsystems' XLS family of MIPS64-based multi-core, multi-threaded processors.

As a result of the joint effort, the companies intend to create a pre-optimized, fully integrated platform on which telecom equipment manufacturers can develop the latest in advanced LTE eNodeB platforms.

"In conjunction with Aricent's advanced LTE software frameworks, our market-leading XLS family of multi-core, multi-threaded processors deliver the superior performance required by our mutual telecom system equipment customers to develop next-generation 4G/LTE eNodeB solutions," said Mark Litvack, senior director of business development, Multi-Core Processors at NetLogic Microsystems.

"The collaborative reference solution, using our best-in-class multi-core processor and Aricent's proven LTE software frameworks, provides a significant advantage for customers looking to create highly optimized 4G infrastructure solutions faster and more efficiently."

"Much of the challenge with LTE lies in carefully timing R&D investments to stay ahead of competition, and being ready when the market sees volume purchases by carriers," said C.P. Murali, sr. vice president at Aricent.

"Our LTE pre-packaged software and frameworks, when coupled with high-performance hardware such as NetLogic Microsystems' XLS multi-core processors, are designed to provide a significant development jumpstart. Combined with Aricent's lifecycle management services, these pre-optimized platforms may dramatically reduce development schedules and development costs to ensure competitive readiness and mitigate market-timing risk."

Aricent's award winning LTE solutions offer equipment manufacturers comprehensive end-to-end solutions including pre-packaged software frameworks conforming to the latest 3GPP standards, along with a comprehensive set of product lifecycle services to develop feature-rich and differentiated products while gaining significant time-to-market advantage at lower R&D costs.

Aricent's portfolio of services spans the entire product lifecycle from strategy and design to requirements definition and software development to interoperability, testing and certification. These pre-packaged software and services are proven to help significantly reduce the costs associated with bringing capital intensive LTE products to market. The various offerings include:

LTE User Equipment (UE) Software Suite: Aricent's LTE UE Software Suite is a complete software package for device and semi-conductor vendors including fully optimized Layer 1, Layer 2 protocol software with support for 100 Mbps downlink and 50 Mbps uplink data rates. The implementation ensures optimal power consumption, processor utilization and easy integration on multiple hardware platforms.

eNodeB Protocol Stacks and Framework: Aricent's existing eNodeB offering provides a turnkey solution for radio access, from pluggable stack software to a pre-integrated and optimized software frameworks for Radio Access equipment, that have been benchmarked on multiple industry leading hardware platforms. Aricent's eNodeB Framework (eNBF) serves as a robust software platform for infrastructure providers planning to develop a complete LTE Release 8+ compliant eNodeB of varying densities (macro/pico/femto).

IP Backhaul: Aricent's IP Backhaul solution is based on its industry-proven ISS Metro platform which offers pre-integrated Layer 2 switching solutions and can be used to build LTE and IP backhaul devices such as IP RAN Aggregation devices, Internet Offload Gateways, and Metro Ethernet devices.

Evolved Packet Core Protocol Stacks and Framework: Aricent offers EPC protocol stacks as well as frameworks for the System Architecture Evolution (SAE) Gateway and the Mobility Management Entity (MME) Gateway. These include support for charging, QoS, high availability, lawful interception, and bearer-related features.

NetLogic Microsystems' XLS family of multi-core, multi-threaded processors used in the reference design offers a rich set of features and functionality with unprecedented performance and power for embedded telecommunications, enterprise, data center, security and storage applications.

These processors integrate up to four high-performance MIPS64 cores, each with four-way simultaneous multi-threading, for a total of 16 fine-grain processor threads to mitigate latency, improve computational efficiency and throughput for network data plane and control plane processing in security appliances, storage appliances, base stations, eNodeB, RNCs, gateways, switches, routers, ATCA and AMC service cards.

The processors also offer a best-in-class packet management, packet distribution and network accelerator engine, an intelligent Fast Messaging Network to maximize on-chip communications bandwidth, a superior memory sub-system, high-speed interconnects, and a broad set of acceleration engines. This enables NetLogic Microsystems' multi-core processors to support billions of in-flight messages and packet descriptors between all on-chip elements.

The processor family is supported by a comprehensive software development kit (SDK) that contains reference and production-ready software components, which enables customers to accelerate time-to-market.