BARCELONA, SPAIN: At the recently held Mobile World Congress 2009, Xilinx Inc. unveiled its product roadmap for delivering the first common platform to integrate the design and development of programmable Long Term Evolution (LTE) baseband and radio subsystems into next-generation wireless 3G and 4G basestation architectures.

The modular "targeted design platform" (TDP) creates an end-to-end LTE basestation (eNodeB) design to accelerate development and reduce costs for both frequency division duplex (FDD) and time division duplex (TDD) variants of LTE (see accompanying graphic). This approach gives system developers the flexibility to leverage the LTE eNodeB TDP at their desired level based on product and time-to market requirements.

The LTE eNodeB TDP brings together Xilinx market-specific platforms tailored for LTE baseband processing and multi-mode digital front end (DFE) radio, with a flexible platform addressing layer-2, transport and associated security functions from Wintegra, Inc. (see separate announcement). Each Xilinx platform consists of cost-optimized Xilinx field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), the industry's broadest portfolio of available LTE intellectual property (IP) and application software, and scalable development environments (tools, boards and reference designs). Xilinx is also collaborating with Agilent Technologies Inc. to validate compliance of hardware and software modules using industry standard test equipment.

"Competition among wireless operators is focused on quick changing market dynamics, including evolving air interfaces, new types of applications, and higher bandwidth services, and this calls for the wireless industry's migration to reprogrammable and reconfigurable hardware to fuel innovation for the next generation," stated Michael Howard, principal analyst at Infonetics Research. "Xilinx's software defined radio or common platform approach to radio and baseband development helps telecommunications equipment manufacturers to focus their R&D efforts on product differentiation, and thereby create products that are more market-adaptable for their customers, the wireless operators, by moving the value from fixed hardware to flexible software."

"The combination of constant air interface standards evolution with the exponentially increasing cost of semiconductor and ASIC development is necessitating the use of software-defined radio architectures by telecommunications equipment manufacturers in order to address the requirements of the operators in the most cost-effective manner," said Manuel Uhm, director of wireless communications at Xilinx and member of the Board of Directors of the SDR Forum. "Xilinx's LTE eNodeB TDP greatly facilitates this disruptive shift by providing a complete basestation design that can be used as a common platform for the development of multi-mode basestations."

Xilinx showcased the flexibility of the LTE eNodeB TDP this week at Mobile World Congress 2009, February 16-19 in Xilinx Booth # E47 (Hall 1). Demonstrations include multi-mode radio and LTE baseband uplink and downlink applications.

Comprehensive LTE eNodeB TDP
The Xilinx LTE Baseband TDP integrates the functional blocks necessary to implement a practical LTE baseband channel system for both uplink and downlink. The LogiCORE(TM) library provides pre-validated and optimized IP cores, such as LTE Turbo Encoder and Decoder, so developers can focus their efforts on product differentiation.

Adding to these capabilities are the new LTE Channel Encoder and Decoder cores that are optimized for high performance, low latency transmissions, and multiple input multiple output (MIMO) Encoder designed to improve the data rate performance of wireless networks. The cores are generated to user-specified parameters with the Xilinx CORE Generator software tool to dramatically reduce development cycles. This automated approach also fully exploits the capabilities of Xilinx XtremeDSP solutions to build lower cost, faster performance, reduced power dissipation, and lower latency into LTE baseband designs.

The Xilinx LTE DFE TDP features a complete optimized set of IP for multi-mode radio design, including Digital Up Conversion (DUC), Digital Down Conversion (DDC), Crest Factor Reduction (CFR), and Digital Pre-Distortion (DPD) for LTE, TD-SCDMA, WiMAX, W-CDMA, CDMA2000 and multi-carrier GSM. These designs have been verified and tested on the Xilinx CDRSX2 radio development board, in conjunction with power amplifiers from a number of vendors, and show transmission efficiencies of up to 40 percent.

Xilinx expects to realize further performance, power and cost advantages for its multi-mode DFE and Baseband TDPs over the coming year as it rolls out support for the new Virtex-6 and Spartan-6 FPGA families introduced earlier this month.