As the industry migrates to higher-speed, lower-latency, data-centric 3G-LTE mobile networks, OEMs increasingly demand DSPs that deliver higher throughput to address growing base station computational complexity.
Freescale Semiconductor has announced two DSPs that it says deliver more than twice the throughput of their predecessors. Freescale’s MSC8157 and MSC8158 products are the next generation of the widely deployed MSC8156 DSP. The new DSPs are based on Freescale’s SC3850 core running at 1.2 Ghz, which recently earned the highest BDTIsimMark2000 fixed-point performance score of any DSP architecture tested to date by independent signal-processing firm Berkley Design Technology, Inc (BDTI).
Freescale’s newest DSPs feature an enhanced version of its MAPLE-B baseband accelerator. The MSC8157 and MSC8158 DSPs offload many mathematical and baseband intensive tasks to the enhanced MAPLE-B2 block, freeing the processors’ six cores to handle other tasks. For example, floating-point MIMO processing is handled by the MAPLE-B2 block, improving latency over floating point DSP core implementations. The MAPLE–B2 block additionally provides OEMs a single hardware platform that supports multi-mode operation and allows for the adoption of additional standards with a simple software switch.
The MSC8157 product supports a broad array of 3G and 4G wireless standards, while the MSC8158 is optimized to enable more efficient and higher throughput deployments for WCDMA networks. Freescale claims both products help lower bill of materials costs by integrating technologies that eliminate the need for additional ASICs and FPGAs required in competing solutions.
Freescale plans to sample the MSC8157/58 DSPs to selected customers in Q1 2011.