DesignArt Networks releases LTE advanced baseband SoC

Mobile World Congress 2011, BARCELONA, SPAIN: DesignArt Networks takes the wrapper of its ground-breaking 40nm 4G SoC platform family with the launch of five distinct SoC solutions.

The DAN3800 Baseband SoC is the 4G performance flagship, targeting next-generation distributed macro base station equipment. It draws new lines in the sand in terms of performance, system integration, and extremely low power consumption.

“At the heart of the DAN3800 is the most scalable 4G baseband pipeline, consisting of optimized multi-core DSP and RISC processing layers, augmented with a software-programmable high-capacity multi-core hardware acceleration layer, all dimensioned to achieve true multi-gigabit ITU Advanced performance,” said Assaf Touboul, DesignArt Networks CTO.

“Consuming only 8 Watts, the DAN3800 delivers multiples in performance of currently available silicon solutions – powering an entire 4-sector LTE Advanced Macro BTS for the delivery of up to 1.2 Gbps of raw 4G data capacity – all with just one single DAN3800 Baseband SoC.”

LTE Advanced, or LTE R10, standardization foresees the use of advanced features and signal processing capabilities, such as successive interference cancellation (SIC), beam forming (BF), multi-user MIMO (MU-MIMO), LTE relay, and multi-carrier spectrum aggregation, to create the necessary multi-gigabit capacity for 4G data services.

Simultaneously, the DAN3800 SoC supports all of these processing intensive technologies, while operating a 4-sector LTE R10 baseband across up to 80 MHz of aggregated spectrum capacity, driving up to 16 transmit and 16 receive paths, far beyond the scalability and performance of existing silicon solutions.

The DAN3800 Baseband SoC uses the fully software-defined radio (SDR) sub-system of the DAN3000 SoC platform. All PHY algorithms are implemented in software, running on a combination of multi-core DSP and multi-core RISC processing layers. Both, DSP and RISC cores have been designed with a unique architecture, specifically tailored for high-performance, yet fully flexible SDR systems. The DAN3800 offers maximum flexibility and a future-proof software evolution path, within the power budget of a dedicated silicon solution.

“The most notable achievement of DesignArt Networks’ DAN3800 SoC platform is not just raw capacity or high scalability, but the fact that it can reach these extreme performance limits within a power consumption budget of just 8W, a fraction of typical design architectures,” said Will Strauss, president, Forward Concepts. “This allows system vendors to design highly integrated ultra-compact 4G BU equipment at lower cost, without compromising performance, RF scalability, or software upgradability.”