Mindspeed presents next generation of 4G base station technology

NEWPORT BEACH, USA: Mindspeed Technologies Inc., a leading supplier of semiconductor solutions for network infrastructure applications, announced that James Johnston, CTO, presented an in-depth architectural overview of the Transcede family of 3G/4G/long-term evolution (LTE) wireless baseband processors at the HOT CHIPS 22 conference at Stanford University in Palo Alto.

Johnston’s presentation, entitled “Transcede: Solving 4G Challenges for Pico, Micro and Macrocell Platforms,” detailed the system-on-chip (SoC) approach to overcoming the computational challenges and complexities presented by the explosion of video traffic across worldwide mobile networks, as today’s operators execute a massive infrastructure upgrade to new 4G standards.

“The increasing use of smart phones and the surge of mobile video applications are key contributors to the network capacity crunch that many 3G subscribers are experiencing,” said Johnston. “3G and 4G network operators are looking to migrate to a more flexible cellular landscape, which can accommodate compact base stations, such as microcells, picocells and metro femtocells. Mindspeed has designed the Transcede family of baseband processors to enable tomorrow’s network architects to deploy powerful 4G macrocells and ‘small cells,’ which are built on a common framework.”

Launched earlier this year at the 2010 Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona, Spain, the Transcede family of SoCs integrates an unprecedented 26 programmable processors into a single device, including two ARM Cortex A9 multi-core symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) reduced instruction set computer (RISC) processors, 10 CEVA digital signal processors (DSPs) and 10 DSP accelerators that support the complete wideband code-division multiple access (W-CDMA), LTE or WiMAX (Layers 1, 2 and above) processing needs of single- and multi-sector base stations.

The Transcede family of SoCs can deliver three sectors of LTE processing in a single device, while still providing substantial processing headroom, allowing manufacturers to deploy their own value-added features as part of an overall Transcede-based solution.