Freescale unveils baseband-to-antenna reference design for small cell base stations

Telecom Lead India: Freescale Semiconductor announced a
new reference design for small office/home office (SOHO) base station
applications.


The baseband-to-antenna reference design combines the
QorIQ Qonverge BSC9131 base station system-on-chip (SoC) with Freescale RF
radio boards, and is a multi-protocol solution that scales across a range of
cellular bands to ease developers’ transition from 3G to 4G LTE.


Sourcing the base station SoC and RF devices from the
same vendor speeds time to market and helps ensure optimal compatibility and
integration.


The Freescale GaAs MMIC devices deployed on the radio
boards are the MMZ25332B and MMZ09312B amplifiers. MMICs provide linearity and
power efficiency and can cover multiple bands including Band 1/WCDMA and Band
13/LTE.


Creating comprehensive femtocell base station solutions
using discrete components from multiple vendors is often cumbersome and
expensive,” said Ritu Favre, vice president and general manager of Freescale’s
RF Division.


The QorIQ Qonverge BSC9131 device features a scalable
architecture that supports a range of air interfaces, including LTE, LTE-FDD
& TDD and WCDMA/CDMA. It combines Power Architecture cores and
high-performance StarCore DSPs with Multi-accelerator Platform Engine (MAPLE-B)
technology for baseband processing.


It features interconnect fabric and next-node process
technology, as well as glueless RFIC communication and antennae interfaces,
eliminating the need for additional chips and reducing board space and cost.


The new MMZ25332B and MMZ09312B MMIC devices deployed on
the radio board, designed by Freescale partner Benetel, belong to a family of
RF GaAs MMIC solutions for femtocells. In addition, two Freescale low noise
amplifiers, the MML09211H and MML20211H, are included on the radio board.


[email protected]