Broadcom intros world's first microwave outdoor unit on a chip

IRVINE, USA: Broadcom Corp. has introduced the world's first microwave outdoor unit (ODU) on a chip. With unparalleled integration, the BCM85810 combines the functionality of up to 10 off-the-shelf chips, dramatically reducing the size, complexity, production cost and power consumption of microwave radio frequency units (RFUs).

Designed to address the need for higher bandwidth and faster time-to-market in microwave split-mount and full/all outdoor units (FODU/AODU), the BCM85810 RF system-on-a-chip (SoC) is based on a flexible architecture, enabling various types of system architectures such as split-mount (IDU-ODU) and all-outdoor (All-ODU) on a common hardware platform.

With only two variants to cover all standard point-to-point microwave frequency bands and all channel bandwidths, the BCM85810 single chip solution simplifies system manufacturing, deployment, and inventory management. With support for high modulation, the BCM85810 delivers a significant improvement in spectrum utilization and capacity.

Industry analysts predict mobile data traffic will quadruple by 2015 as the number of mobile users and use of multimedia services continues to rise. To manage this massive growth in wireless traffic and evolution of 4G/LTE networks, mobile operators are investing in next generation mobile backhaul networks to meet the performance and bandwidth requirements of backhauling data from the cell sites to the core networks. Analysts predict the microwave backhaul market to exceed $6 billion with microwave unit shipments nearing 3 million by 2015.