Freescale Unveils QorIQ Qonverge Macrocell Base Station-on-Chip

Freescale Semiconductor unveiled its first large cell base station-on-chip built on its QorIQ Qonverge multimode platform.


The new QorIQ Qonverge B4860 baseband processor, which is expected to begin sampling in Q2, supports LTE, LTE-Advanced and WCDMA standards. It is implemented in 28nm technology and offers more than 21 GHz of raw programmable performance. The macrocell SoC integrates four dual-thread, 64-bit e6500 Power Architecture cores with AltiVec SIMD engines running at up to 1.8 GHz. The e6500 core is ideal for Layer 2, control and transport processing, and incorporates an enhanced version of the proven, high performance and widely adopted AltiVec vector processing unit, which boosts performance for Layer 2 scheduling algorithms. The e6500 core has achieved the highest CoreMark® benchmark performance-per-watt profile ever recorded for an embedded processor. The B4860 also integrates six all-new, high performance SC3900 StarCore FVP cores running at 1.2 GHz. Together, these technologies provide a balanced, programmable architecture for all baseband digital processing layers for next-generation base stations.


The macro base station chip extends Freescale’s QorIQ Qonverge small cell products, which were first introduced a year ago. The QorIQ Qonverge portfolio shares a common architecture integrating Power Architecture microprocessors, StarCore digital signal processors and wireless acceleration technologies on a single chip.


Freescale notes that the new B4860 is one of the first single-chip LTE base station products to support three sectors of 20 MHz, and is designed to replace today’s channel cards that can include up to six discrete devices. In addition to simplified design and board-level efficiency resulting from reduced part counts, the B4860 provides 4x cost reduction and 3x power reduction compared to similarly deployed discrete solutions. The chip also supports Multi-RAT (i.e. multi-standard) and Multimode (i.e. LTE-A, LTE and WCDMA) standards simultaneously.


The company cited Fujitsu and Alcatel-Lucent as lead customers for the key technologies powering the QorIQ Qonverge B4860 baseband processor. Alcatel Lucent is already planning lightRadio base station designs built on Freescale’s QorIQ Qonverge B4860.


“Freescale’s QorIQ Qonverge macrocell products provide the performance, energy efficiency and cost effectiveness that OEMs and service providers need to help address challenges associated with the growing tsunami of wireless data worldwide,�? said Tom Deitrich, senior vice president and general manager of Freescale's Networking & Multimedia Solutions Group. “The QorIQ Qonverge B4860 macrocell baseband processor allows OEMs to develop differentiated products that help service providers ramp LTE, begin to deploy LTE-Advanced and address the stringent cost requirements of WCDMA base station processing.�?http://www.freescale.com