Greater software content, reconfigurable hardware and multiple programmable cores are needed to cope with the rapidly increasing problem of a growing multiplicity of wireless air interfaces, the Future Horizons International Electronics Forum in Budapest was told this week.
“Software defined radio has been coming for a long time. The vision is to have generic hardware which can be programmed to any radio standard,” said Professor Yrjo Nuevo, technology advisor, Nokia mobile phones. “There’s been a lot of activity especially by the US military who want a single radio to use all the standards in use by all nations [33 waveforms from 2MHz to 55GHz].”
Nuevo said that $25bn had been earmarked to achieve this by the US JTRS (Joint Tactical Radio System).
“GSM, GPRS, EDGE, UMTS, HEDPA, HSUPA, WiFi, Wimax, Bluetooth, UWB, RFID, how do you get all these interfaces into one device?” asked Doug Rasor, vice-president of worldwide strategic marketing at Texas Instruments. “It’s a big challenge. It needs to be done in software and reconfigurable hardware with multiple programmable cores on one device.” TI’s latest OMAP platform for mobile handsets has nine cores.
Rasor added: “There are more software engineers at TI than chip designers.”