Intel Mobile Communications intros advanced multimode LTE platform

Mobile World Congress 2011, NEUBIBERG, GERMANY & BARCELONA, SPAIN: Intel Mobile Communications, a leading vendor of advanced mobile semiconductors solutions for handheld devices, has announced the compact multimode (LTE/3G/2G) platform XMM 7060.

The latest enhancement of the company’s comprehensive slim modem portfolio consists of the highly integrated multimode baseband processor X-GOLDTM 706 and the associated multimode RF transceiver SMARTiTM 4G. The chipset is complemented by a robust, full-featured and comprehensively validated 3GPP Release 8 triple mode protocol stack with Inter-Rat features. The new space saving platform is suitable for integration in LTE-enabled portable devices such as mobile handsets, data cards/dongles and other embedded solutions.

LTE is a fast growing market driven by the increasing demand for such mobile broadband services as multimedia broadcasting, music and video streaming and high-speed mobile Internet. It is expected to become the worldwide mobile standard for high-speed Internet due to its high data throughput and high spectral efficiency.

However, LTE is faced with the challenge of a strongly fragmented regional frequency landscape. This calls for major RF innovation to create a low-power modem platform that can cover all the diverse frequency plans fitting to portable devices. Intel Mobile Communications is leveraging its proven leadership in RF and meets this challenge by offering the XMM 7060 platform.

“It is our intention to serve this growing market with a compact multimode solution equal to today’s 3G PCB footprint,” says Prof. Dr. Hermann Eul, president of Intel Mobile Communications. “The slim modem is optimized for low-power operation and has the flexibility to serve up to five LTE bands concurrently with five 3G and four 2G bands, making the dream of a real world-phone come true.”

The X-GOLD 706 baseband processor, manufactured in 40nm process technology, is based on the proven 2G/3G X-GOLDTM 626 with an integrated low power LTE L1 subsystem. Therefore, smart phones and tablets based on the XMM 6260 2G/3G platform using the X-GOLD 626 can be easily migrated to LTE ensuring the customers a high degree of reuse of their hardware and software investment.

The new baseband processor is accompanied with the SMARTi 4G, incorporating optimized building blocks of the leading-edge 2G/3G SMARTi UE2 and SMARTi LU RF transceiver -- the world’s first commercially available LTE transceiver. The 65nm CMOS RF transceiver employs a proven digital architecture that significantly reduces the number of external RF components such as power amplifiers and filters, and, hence, reduces board space, BOM and power consumption.

The XMM 7060 slim modem platform fits in less than 700mm² PCB (Printed Circuit Board) area including all necessary system components for quad band LTE, penta band 3G and quad band EDGE applications. It supports LTE category 3 (CAT-3) throughputs (100Mbps/50Mbps download/upload respectively) and is compliant to LTE Release 8 standard supporting FDD and TDD mode for all bandwidth up to 20MHz. In addition Inter-RAT handover features with 3G and 2G systems are naturally included.