Freescale builds leadership position in small cell market

Mobile World Congress 2012, BARCELONA, SPAIN: Freescale Semiconductor’s QorIQ Qonverge small cell base station-on-chip processors have met with rapid adoption since their introduction last year. Companies adopting QorIQ Qonverge processors for their next-generation designs currently account for more than 50 percent of the small cell base station market.

To help fuel additional success, Freescale will provide QorIQ Qonverge PSC913x femtocell products with commercial LTE Layer 1 software for small cell base stations. This new, production-quality software, branded under the company’s VortiQa networking software line, is closely coupled with the silicon for optimal performance and streamlined development.

The offering is one of the industry’s first LTE Layer 1 software stacks on a fully scalable base station SoC platform featuring multimode support for LTE + WCDMA. The software is integrated and tested with partners’ L2/L3 and RF software, allowing customers to leverage Freescale’s software investment and realize a lower cost of market entry.

“One year after introducing our QorIQ Qonverge products, many customers have adopted our femtocell base station-on-chip technology and will soon have access to even more comprehensive solutions with our attached Layer 1 software,” said Scott Aylor, GM of Freescale Wireless Access Division. “Because we designed the software specifically to leverage the QorIQ Qonverge platform, customers get optimal performance from world-class DSP and microprocessor technologies, plus they get to market faster.”

Many leading wireless infrastructure base station companies including Airvana and ip.access have adopted Freescale’s QorIQ Qonverge PSC913x processors for their small cell base station solutions. Together, Freescale’s QorIQ Qonverge PSC913x customers represent more than 50 percent of the small cell market, positioning Freescale well in this fast-growing market.

“Freescale’s QorIQ Qonverge product line gives us the flexibility to cost-effectively address the widest possible small cell market by providing a common architecture that supports our 3G CDMA and 4G LTE femtocell product lines, and programmability that allows us to incorporate advanced features,” said Michael Clark, Airvana’s GM for Femtocell Business. “Freescale’s QorIQ Qonverge products are helping accelerate the deployment of our world-class small cells in next-generation wireless networks.”

“After an extensive RFQ process, it was clear that Freescale is the ideal partner to supply the defining processor for our new dual-mode 3G/LTE access point products,” said Dr. Nick Johnson, CTO for ip.access. “Freescale’s QorIQ Qonverge line offers unmatched scalability, performance and multimode capability in a highly advanced system-on-a-chip solution.”

Part of the QorIQ Qonverge product line, Freescale’s PSC913x products combine multiple Power Architecture cores and high-performance StarCore DSPs with MAPLE (multi-accelerator platform engine) multimode baseband technology, packet processing acceleration engines, interconnect fabric and next-node process technology.

The PSC9130/31 femtocell SoCs (for eight to 16 simultaneous users) were among the first available QorIQ Qonverge processors. The processors support a range of air interfaces, including LTE (FDD/TDD), WCDMA (UMTS, HSPA+), WiMAX, and CDMA. The devices also incorporate glueless RFIC communication and antennae interfaces, eliminating the need for additional chips (such as FPGAs) and ultimately reducing board space and cost. The ultra-integrated PSC913x family also provides support for GPS synchronization and 2G/WCDMA/LTE sniffing in a single device.

VortiQa wireless infrastructure LTE layer 1 software
The Layer 1 software package includes 3GPP LTE L1 software, CodeWarrior tools support and a full board support package (BSP) including drivers, SDOS, Linux OS and APIs for key accelerators (e.g. MAPLE, SEC). Customers also have access to commercial operating systems and tools from Freescale third party partners.