60-GHz system IP for WiGig and backhaul markets
Imagination Technologies and Blu Wireless Technology are collaborating to advance 60 GHz wireless technology, using BWT’s baseband IP and Imagination’s MIPS Aptiv processors; the outcome will be, the two companies say, a unique heterogeneous processing architecture to provide highly efficient baseband processing
Imagination Technologies (IMG.L) and Blu Wireless Technology (BWT) are sharing details of Blu Wireless’ HYDRA baseband technology for efficient multi-gigabit wireless processing. The technology exploits multiple MIPS Aptiv processors together with HYDRA vector DSP technology in a heterogeneous multiprocessing architecture targeting the growing use of 60 GHz frequencies.
The 60 GHz market is being driven by consumer demand for HD video ‘anywhere, anytime’ via smartphones, laptops and tablets. 802.11ad Wi-Fi (also called WiGig), which uses the 60 GHz band, is coming the market and is capable of delivering more than 20 times the speed of existing Wi-Fi.
4G basestation companies are also planning to use the 60 GHz band for high-speed unlicensed wireless links between small cells that can be mounted on street furniture such as signs, benches and streetlamps.
The MIPS microAptiv CPU, the two companies say, is suited to deeply embedded multi-core designs such as the HYDRA WiGig baseband processor, where the combination of a tightly coupled co-processor interface with customised co-processor instructions provides an efficient route to extended designs. A mature software development and debugging environment for extended multicore processors is in place.
HYDRA baseband technology uses a heterogeneous multiprocessing architecture, mixing fixed-function DSP blocks in a highly optimised parallel vector data plane. BWT is implementing a multicore arrangement of MIPS microAptiv processors to provide a mature software development platform for the control plane, delivering configurable co-processor instructions deep into the HYDRA baseband data plane. This combination of multicore MIPS and HYDRA vector DSP provides a mature software development, debugging and traceability of dataflow in the high speed data plane.
BWT is also employing a MIPS CPU for control of its optimised MAC datapath, providing acceleration of lower MAC layer processing for customer-driven expansion features. The multi-threading within the MIPS interAptiv core enables better overall throughput, quality of service (QoS), and power/performance efficiency, the company believes., adding that the modular parallel architecture of HYDRA can be simply scaled to support implementations ranging from its current specification of 2 to 7Gbps, to 20Gbps and beyond.
Imagination; www.imgtec.com
Blu Wireless; www.bluwirelesstechnology.com
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