Marvell announces first ‘world’ modem chip for LTE

Chip maker Marvell has announced what it says is the world’s first single-chip solution for LTE and has aimed it at a wide variety of internet enabled devices such as smartphones, tablets, laptops , set-top-boxes, TVs and automotive applications.

The PXA1801 features a Mobile Multi-RAT design and offers support for 3GPP R9 Cat 4 FDD-LTE and TDD-LTE with R8 DC-HSPA+ for both WB-CDMA and TD-SCDMA standards and EDGE. In other words, it supports both FDD and TDD flavours of LTE, HSPA+ and the 2.5G EDGE standard in one chip.

The single chip solution should enable it to lower costs and help devices reduce power consumption, which is vital in portable devices such as laptops, tablets and smartphones. Marvell claimed that its chip offers “superior technical performance”, “extreme flexibility” and delivered, “a much lower cost of implementation”.

The company said that the chip would offer future proofing through supporting 3GPP Release 9 features such as dual layer beamforming, handle SISO and MIMO operation,  and support Category 4 throughput of 150Mbps on the downlink.

“The world modem is another game-changing breakthrough from Marvell, said Weili Dai, Marvell’s co-founder, in a statement. “I envision a time soon when a truly affordable global communications network helps to bring our world closer as consumers from every walk of life enjoy uninterrupted access to all services, applications and the worldwide cloud from any device they choose anywhere they roam.”

However, Marvell will have to convince manufactures and carriers to take its leading edge technology on board. In June, Altair demoed its chipset to China Mobile, hitting 50Mbps in real world tests.