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Saturday 22 November 2008
Design
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WiMAX rollout simplified by configurable transceiver
Tuesday 30 October 2007
Lime Microsystems has launched its first commercial product, a configurable RF transceiver for WiMAX basestations which are currently in the development phase.
The Guildford-based fabless chip company is offering the two chip transceiver as part of a reference design which is based on the MicroTCA systems format.
“We have customers evaluating silicon,” company CEO Dr Ebrahim Bushehri told EW.
With frequency allocation for proposed WiMAX broadband wireless access services an issue in different parts of the world, Bushehri said there is a requirement for an RF transceiver which can be configured for different frequency bands.
Configurability is the most important issue for Lime and so the reference design supports different baseband interfaces, bandwidths and data rates. An Altera Stratix II GX FPGA is used to provide signal processing which is adaptable for various sampling rates.
Targeted at WiMAX basestations for femtocells and picocells, the zero-IF transceiver has six user-selectable channel bandwidths from 1.5MHz to 14MHz and can be digitally configured to operate in bands from 2 to 4GHz.
It uses 12-bit baseband ADCs and DACs, a 40MHz sampling rate and its serial RapidIO interface supports a throughput of up to 3.125Gbit/s.
The transceiver is fabbed on a silicon germanium process but Bushehri confirmed that in the long term the plan is to move to an all-CMOS device. “The aim is the backend of 2008 for the CMOS device,” said Bushehri.
Lime Microsystems, which was founded in 2005, has design teams in the UK and Lithuania.
“High level system architecture design takes place in Guildford and we have a design team in Lithuania for circuit design and implementation,” said Bushehri.
The Guildford-based fabless chip company is offering the two chip transceiver as part of a reference design which is based on the MicroTCA systems format.
“We have customers evaluating silicon,” company CEO Dr Ebrahim Bushehri told EW.
With frequency allocation for proposed WiMAX broadband wireless access services an issue in different parts of the world, Bushehri said there is a requirement for an RF transceiver which can be configured for different frequency bands.
Configurability is the most important issue for Lime and so the reference design supports different baseband interfaces, bandwidths and data rates. An Altera Stratix II GX FPGA is used to provide signal processing which is adaptable for various sampling rates.
Targeted at WiMAX basestations for femtocells and picocells, the zero-IF transceiver has six user-selectable channel bandwidths from 1.5MHz to 14MHz and can be digitally configured to operate in bands from 2 to 4GHz.
It uses 12-bit baseband ADCs and DACs, a 40MHz sampling rate and its serial RapidIO interface supports a throughput of up to 3.125Gbit/s.
The transceiver is fabbed on a silicon germanium process but Bushehri confirmed that in the long term the plan is to move to an all-CMOS device. “The aim is the backend of 2008 for the CMOS device,” said Bushehri.
Lime Microsystems, which was founded in 2005, has design teams in the UK and Lithuania.
“High level system architecture design takes place in Guildford and we have a design team in Lithuania for circuit design and implementation,” said Bushehri.
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