Freescale Unveils New Metrocell Base Station Processor

Freescale Semiconductor is unveiling its next generation QorIQ Qonverge portfolio of base station-on-chip processors. The new base station SoC integrates digital front-end (DFE) technology, which improves power amplifier (PA) efficiency and significantly reduces base station power and costs.

The QorIQ Qonverge B3421 device offers embedded CPU cores, DSP cores, baseband accelerators and DFE technology.  It also features Power over Ethernet (PoE) capabilities to meet low power requirements, support for JESD204B, JESD207 and CPRI interfaces to support various antenna schemes, PCI Express for connectivity to WiFi chipsets, SATA for local content caching and Ethernet SGMII backhaul interfaces.

The B3421 device is fully optimized for concurrent LTE and WiFi operation, and supports LTE-TDD, LTE-FDD and LTE-Advanced wireless standards. Advanced 4x4 MiMO algorithms and 3GPP standard up to Release 11, advanced interference cancelling schemes, eICIC and carrier aggregation additionally improve spectral efficiency and provide future-proofing for OEMs and operators.

“Freescale pioneered the base station-on-chip market three years ago when we introduced the industry's first multimode wireless base station processor family to scale from small to large cells,” said Tareq Bustami, vice president of product management for Freescale’s Digital Networking business. “The new QorIQ Qonverge B3421 device targets the rapidly growing metro segment and reinforces our commitment to wireless networking leadership, as we continue to invest to stay ahead of market requirements.”

Sampling for the QorIQ Qonverge B3421 product is planned for Q1 2015.

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