Analog Devices, Altera to streamline wireless infrastructure system development

NORWOOD, USA: Analog Devices Inc. (ADI) has introduced a high-performance development platform for wireless infrastructure equipment designers who need to quickly evaluate systems using DPD (digital pre-distortion) techniques in multi-carrier cellular base stations.

ADI’s MS-DPD (mixed-signal, digital pre-distortion) development platform seamlessly integrates a complete high-performance RF and mixed-signal transmit chain from ADI with any FPGA (field-programmable gate array) development kit with an HSMC (high-speed mezzanine card) connector from industry leading programmable-logic vendor Altera.

“Analog Devices’ RF and mixed-signal portfolio gives our customers access to a complete radio architecture, which allows them to lower engineering overhead and time-to-market,” said Martin Cotter, segment director, Communications Infrastructure, Analog Devices.

“By collaborating with Altera, ADI is now able to offer customers the complete circuitry and components needed to implement a base station radio. The MS-DPD platform offers the highest performance possible in the transmit and observation-path signal chains, allowing our customers to focus on differentiation in their DPD algorithm implementations.”

The complete multi-carrier development platform has best-in-class dynamic performance, which reduces the time spent on component selection, interoperability issues and board layout while freeing design resources to optimize the DPD algorithms required by multi-carrier GSM and multi-standard SDR (software-defined radio) applications.

FPGAs enable designers to quickly re-program DPD algorithms during product development to correct for non-linearities in the radio’s transmit paths while improving the power efficiency of the entire radio. FPGAs also provide the flexibility to optimize the solution that competing fixed-function ASICs (application-specific integrated circuits) cannot.

“This collaboration between ADI and Altera provides customers with a complete system-level hardware development platform for base station radio designs that complements our portfolio of RF solutions, which includes multi-mode CFR and DPD IP," said Arun Iyengar, senior director of Altera's communications business unit.

"The MS-DPD board has native support for Altera’s HSMC connector and can seamlessly interface with the FPGA development kits from Altera and our partners. The in-field-programmability feature of Altera FPGAs significantly lowers the risk of introducing new technologies such as DPD, while also offering scalability to further enhance flexibility and provide a low-risk cost-reduction path for high-volume production with our HardCopy ASICs.”