LTE Awards 2012 – Category 10 Preview: Best Chipset / Processor Product

Now in its third year, the annual LTE Awards, in associated with Telecoms.com, are now established as the leading event of its kind. The LTE Awards are designed to recognise, celebrate and reward the great innovations that are being made in the industry, and this year are co-located with the LTE World Summit 2012, taking place on the evening of the 23rd, at the El Xalet, Montjuic, Barcelona. The event is sure to be a glamorous and entertaining evening for all participants.

The winners, from a varied selection of 10 categories and 48 shortlisted companies, will be picked by an independent panel of judges, consisting of leading industry experts, during a two week assessment process.

To whet your appetite for the event here is a preview of Category 10: Best Chipset/Processor Product.

This award is for chipsets and processors that are exceptional in their area. The processors are judged on their success in the market and how they contribute to making LTE more attractive for operators and device manufacturers.

Freescale: QorIQ Qonverge B4860 Baseband Processor

The QorIQ Qonverge B4860 is new to the market, and was announced on 27 February 2012, at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. It is designed for LTE and LTE-Advanced base stations and is single-chip product supporting three 20MHz sectors of 300Mbps downlink and 150Mbps downlink per sector. Designed to replace channel cards with up to six discrete devices it provides a 4x cost reduction and 3x power reduction compared to similarly deployed channel cards with discrete devices thanks to a simplified architecture. It is first SoC to comply with the LTE-Advanced standard supporting up to 60 MHz of carrier bandwidth and LTE-A, LTE and WCDMA standards simultaneously. The six cores of the SC3900 StarCore DSP registered the industry’s highest performance benchmark score of 224,760, nearly 2x higher than its closest competitor. Alcatel-Lucent and Fujitsu have announced plans to use this device as well as other top-tier OEMs to come.

GCT Semiconductor: GDM7240

The GDM7240 is a single chip LTE FDD solution introduced to the market in Q2 2010. It offers a highly integrated full band design supporting all FDD LTE bands. By integrating baseband + RF, GDM7240 offers a small form factor and low power consumption, as well as optimal BOM. Being fully compliant with LTE specification (3GPP Release 8), the GDM7240 supports LTE Category 3 with high performance throughputs of 100Mbps downlink and 50Mbps uplink.  It is commercially available in several LTE devices, including the LG Esteem on MetroPCS, the LG Revolution on Verizon Wireless as well as the USB dongles LG VL600; available with Verizon Wireless, and the LG Adenaline, available on AT&T.  In addition, Vodafone offers a CPE with GCT’s GDM7240.

Renesas Mobile Corporation: MP5232

This platform is targeting the $150-300 market and will enable operators and device manufacturers to drive LTE to new price points without compromising the user experience. The fully certified platform is a world first as it contains connectivity, power management, RF subsystem and communications processor integrated on a single piece of silicon. It contains a 1.5GHz dual-core applications processor, a graphics accelerator and a Cat-4 triple mode LTE modem supporting FDD-LTE, TD-LTE, DC-HSPA+ and GSM. The single chip integration results in reduced power consumption delivering increased battery life for the consumer. The graphical processor Imagination Technology SGX544 delivers leading-edge performance with optimised power consumption. The LTE modem performance exceeds LTE Category 3, enabling operators to move to Category 4 without delay. As a result of the performance, integration and feature set of the product Renesas  is seeing considerable interest from Tier 1 OEMs.

Texas Instruments:TMS320TCI6636 wireless infrastructure System-on-Chip (SoC)

The Texas Instruments: TMS320TCI6636 is designed to maximise the use of the spectrum that is available to operators. Based on TI’s innovative KeyStone II multi-core architecture, the TCI6636 is designed to reduce costs for true multi-standard products scalable from small to macro cells. The TCI6636 is a fully integrated system-on-chip (SoC) that through functional integration eliminates the need for a separate network processor, and an array of switches and FPGAs. TI estimates that the implementation of this SoC results in a savings of $625 in BoM cost and reduces power consumption on a typical base station board by 75 watts over existing solutions. Announced in February 2012, the TCI6636 SoC will begin sampling in the second half of 2012. The TCI6636 has been designed into base stations under development by most of the major manufactures and several of the leading new entrants. And TI anticipates anticipate high volume ramps in 2013.

The LTE World Summit is taking place on the 23-24 May 2012 CCIB, Barcelona, Spain. Click here to register your http://ws.lteconference.com/interest.