At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week Freescale Semiconductor has introduced a highly integrated “base station-on-chip” portfolio built on multicore technology. The company’s new QorIQ Qonverge portfolio is based on a common architecture and integrates communications processing, digital signal processing and wireless acceleration technologies into a single system-on-chip in various configurations; the QorIQ Qonverge portfolio includes four distinct products optimized for small cell (femto and pico) and large cell (metro and macro) applications.
This integration lowers part counts and delivers power, cost and footprint reductions for base stations. According to Freescale QorIQ Qonverge technology can deliver 4x cost reduction and 3x power reduction for LTE + WCDMA macro base stations, and 4x cost and power reductions for LTE + WCDMA pico base stations when compared to wireless infrastructure equipment powered by discrete silicon products.
The first products in Freescale’s QorIQ Qonverge multicore portfolio are built in 45-nm process technology and planned for availability in the second half of 2011. The products are the PSC9130/PSC9131 femto SoCs and PSC9132 picocell/enterprise femto SoC devices. Freescale plans to introduce portfolio members targeting larger cell (metro and macro) base stations built in 28-nm process technology later this year.