Maxim Freescale tandem demos LTE/3G picocell base station

Ideal for outdoor public access or enterprise small cell applications, the LTE/3G picocell brings together a Freescale BSC9132 base station SoC card, a Maxim MAX2580 RF transceiver card, RF power amplifiers, and network management cards—all in a passively cooled enclosure and weighing in at 6.8kg.

The innovative small cell base station platform design is field deployable by mobile operators and also serves as a production-ready reference design to accelerate time to market for equipment manufacturers.

The BSC9132 features two Power Architecture e500 cores and two StarCore DSP cores, along with Freescale's high-performance MAPLE-B2P base band accelerator platform. The MAX2580 is an RF to Bits, high-dynamic-performance LTE/3G radio transceiver. The BSC9132 and MAX2580 work seamlessly to deliver a complete multi-band, multi-standard small cell solution.

The MAX2580 operates in all LTE bands from Band 1 to Band 41 with selectable channel bandwidths from 1.4MHz to 20MHz; supports FDD-LTE, TD-LTE, and WCDMA modes; JESD207 data interface provides a seamless radio interconnect between the MAX2580 and BSC9132.

The BSC9132 supports multi-mode operation that enables it to process LTE-FDD/TDD and HSPA+ users simultaneously. It is engineered to address the performance and cost requirements of up to 20MHz single sector LTE-FDD/TDD. The BSC9132 can process 64 simultaneous users and handles 150 Mbit/s downlink with 75 Mbit/s uplink rates in 20MHz LTE-FDD/TDD mode, and 42 Mbit/s downlink with 11.5 Mbit/s uplink rates in 5MHz HSPA+ mode.

- Paul Buckley
??EE Times Europe