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.