With a capacity shortfall looming, service providers are deploying Heterogeneous Networks (HetNets) with small cell underlays in dense urban areas and using distributed Radio Access Networks (RANs) to narrow the gap between capacity and demand, and all of these techniques are driving integration into the next generation base station baseband.
“These next generation baseband processors are heterogeneous multicore SoC devices including both DSP and CPU cores for control and data plane processing along with hardware acceleration and connectivity for backhaul and radio interfaces,” said Nick Marshall, principal analyst, mobile networks, ABI Research.
This segment is also seeing merger and acquisition activities. Examples include: Broadcom’s acquisition of Provigent, Percello and NetLogic, Mindspeed’s purchase of Picochip, Wavesat’s sale to Cavium, Xilinx’s acquisition of Modesat, and Qualcomm’s purchase of DesignArt.
These M&A activities indicate that there are significant revenue opportunities for baseband SoCs in the distributed RAN and HetNet segments and that vendors are positioning themselves to challenge current leaders Freescale Semiconductor and Texas Instruments.
With the latest SoCs available or becoming available over the next 6-9 months in 28nm silicon technology these will be some of the most advanced baseband ICs ever produced and raise the bar in terms of complexity.
