Freescale launches LTE-Advanced basestation on a chip
The B4860 is built on a 28nm process and uses four of the new PowerPC cores, the dual threaded e6500, with higher memory bandwidth. These sit alongside six of the new SC3900 Starcore DSP core with 32 MAC/cycle baseband specific instructions, improved control code execution and up to eight instructions per cycle and up to eight data lanes vector in a single instruction (SIMD8). Other advancements include high memory bandwidth, core clustering and full hardware cache coherency within the core and throughout the whole device. At 1.2 GHz, the SC3900 core registered a BDTIsimMark2000 performance benchmark score of 37,460.
“The QorIQ Qonverge B4860 macrocell baseband processor allows OEMs to develop differentiated products that help service providers ramp LTE, begin to deploy LTE-Advanced and address the stringent cost requirements of WCDMA base station processing,” said Tom Deitrich, senior vice president and general manager of Freescale’s Networking & Multimedia Solutions Group. Freescale has also developed the L1 software that supports the new cores and dedicated accelerators to get the performance for LTE-AThe B4860 is one of the first single-chip LTE base station products to support three sectors of 20 MHz, and is designed to replace today’s channel cards that can include up to six discrete devices.
The MAPLE-B baseband acceleration platform, in addition to its support for FEC, FFT and UMTS chiprate processing, enables the development of advanced receiver algorithms such as parallel and successive interference cancellation techniques, single and multi-user MIMO, LTE relay and carrier aggregation for improved spectral efficiency. This enables significant reduction of processing latencies compared to conventional techniques. Multicore cache-coherent fabric brings single core programming simplicity to the multicore SoCs. Industry standard interfaces ensure interoperability and built-in future-proof scalability with CPRI, Serial RapidIO, 10G Ethernet and PCI-express interfaces. Precise partitioning for system software is supported with best-of-breed DSP cores and baseband acceleration for Layer 1 processing and CPU cores with security and IP packet acceleration for Layer 2, control and transport processing.
Fujitsu and Alcatel-Lucent have a long track record of using the key technologies powering the QorIQ Qonverge B4860 baseband processor, and Alcatel Lucent is already planning lightRadio base station designs built on the device.
The B4860 family is supported by the CodeWarrior Integrated Development Environment (IDE) based on Eclipse technology to provide a highly comprehensive multicore development environment. Available tools include the B4860QDS development board, C optimizing compilers for Power Architecture and StarCore platforms, multicore source level debugger, core and device simulators, optimized device drivers and software analysis tools for profiling and program/data trace.
The B4860 is expected to sample in Q2.
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