The fast-changing wireless world requires designers to create new products quickly to take advantage of new standards and opening markets while beating the competition—not an easy thing to do. But several companies are offering products that can help designers do just that. Cognovo and Lime Microsystems have software-defined radio (SDR) chips and kits that can help you bring new wireless gear to market soon. Also, Aglient Technologies is using the Lime chip in its new wireless test system.

Cognovo, which is in the software-defined modem licensing business, recently announced the availability of its SDR baseband development chip (CDC160) for 3G, Long-Term Evolution (LTE), and LTE-Advanced. This 45-nm low-power device is based on Cognovo’s latest Modem Compute Engine core, the MCE160. It enables licensees to develop soft modems in all cellular and wireless standards up to and including LTE-Advanced.

The CDC160 is supplied mounted within a system-level development platform providing support for rapid development, debug, and validation, against reference test equipment such as the Rohde & Schwarz series of communications testers or integration with RF devices for field testing (Fig. 1). Cognovo’s Software Modem Development Environment enables rapid prototyping of new modems.

Available to OEMs and semiconductor vendors, the development platform allows early implementations of LTE-Advanced user terminals, even as the standards are being finalized. As the next-generation 4G wireless broadband standard defined in 3GPP, LTE-Advanced supports data rates in excess of 1 Gbit/s, which is three times the performance of the 3.9G systems rolling out today

Cognovo’s unique soft modem approach uses a cluster of high-performance vector processors programmed in high-level C code, together with a novel control and scheduling system. Because the generic hardware is configured by software alone, the hardware can be finalized before the software, and the same chips can be used in development and the final product. The CDC160 device can also be used to support development of other modem standards, such as LTE, 3G, or 802.111a/b/g/n/af/ac.

Cognovo has put its intellectual property (IP) core in a baseband device to provide customers with a fast-track development vehicle and to prove the performance of the IP. The platform delivers multi-mode products with silicon area and power consumption lower than the hardware designs that exist today and in a fraction of the time. The Cognovo SDM platform consists of the Modem Compute Engine (MCE), a licensable processor subsystem, the run-time SDM Operating System (SDM-OS), and a fully integrated soft modem development suite.  

The Lime Microsystems LMS6002D also can speed advanced wireless product development. It is especially useful for creating wireless devices for femtocell and picocell basestations and other multi-band, multi-standard radios. Also, the transceiver boasts integrated analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) and digital-to-analog converters (DACs) (Fig. 2).

The LMS6002D covers the 300-MHz to 3.8-GHz range and supports modulation bandwidths from 1.5 to 28 MHz. It additionally supports both time-division duplex (TDD) and frequency-division duplex (FDD) formats. Deployments include the Sprint Airwalk femtocell and the Cambridge Consultants Sidewinder femtocell design. The chip is also part of the new Agilent Technologies wireless test system.

Agilent Technologies and Lime Microsystems have announced a combination of test equipment, transceiver technology, and control software that constitutes a new method for testing and evaluating advanced wireless systems. The evaluation platform, which includes a suite of test equipment and software, saves today’s digital and software-defined radio designers development time and cuts optimization cycles, helping to speed new products to market.

The LMS6002D is already widely used in a wide variety of market sectors, including cellular small cells, software defined radios, public safety, and land mobile radios. The joint effort with Agilent enables customers to evaluate the chip quickly and efficiently.

The Lime Microsystems evaluation platform and associated control software permits users to adjust the transceiver’s uplink and downlink frequencies from 300 MHz to 3.8 GHz, with no gaps, and to set the on-chip channel filters to accommodate all cellular standards.

With Agilent test equipment and the transceiver from Lime, customers can generate digital IQ signals using a pattern generator, convert these signals to RF, and analyze the RF signals with Agilent’s Vector Signal Analyzer software on an Agilent Spectrum Analyzer or wideband oscilloscope.

This setup is supported by a comprehensive set of Agilent software tools (including the company’s popular Signal Studio), coupled with the Lime user interface, for optimizing the RF parameters on a given standard or frequency band, providing a simple and fast method for configuring the Lime transceiver (Fig. 3). The 16900 series logic analyzers are available now with prices starting at approximately $20,000.

Agilent
www.agilent.com

Cognovo
www.cognovo.com/products

Lime Microsystems
www.limemicro.com