CEA-Leti has developed a digital baseband circuit for software-defined-radio and cognitive-radio applications.
The French microelectronics research organisation claimed it can be reconfigured in less than 50µs.
The chip, which has been dubbed Magali, is based on CEA-Leti’s powerful mesh asynchronous network-on-chip (ANOC) infrastructure delivering 2.2Gbyte/s/link.
The chip includes 23 integrated processors dedicated to signal processing and bit-level processing associated with an ARM1176 processor for medium access control.
“For the first time, a full 4G mobile baseband circuit can be reconfigured in less than 50µs (maximum time), while typical test cases show a 4µs reconfiguration-time (average time observed),” said CEA-Leti.
It also supports the sharing of the computing units between two radio access technologies, which makes it relevant to software-defined-radio and cognitive-radio applications.
The ANOC technology sets up 23 frequency islands which can be programmed dynamically to optimise power.
“A result, the circuit exhibits less than 500mW for up to 40GOPS performance,” said the organisation.
The chip has been tested on a 3GPP-LTE application, delivering 50Mbits/s on a 4x2 MIMO scheme.
It is integrated at present in a prototyping board used in two major European ICT projects, BEFEMTO and ARTIST4G.