WCDMA baseband addresses low-end smartphone market

RDA Microelectronics has unveiled a WCDMA baseband SoC that is designed for smartphone devices running on Android 4.0 and above.

The RDA8860 integrates an RF transceiver, WCDMA modem, EDGE modem, application processor, power management unit, analog baseband, and 32kHz oscillator onto a single 40nm die, thereby reducing the overall bill of materials.

The chip is based on a 1GHz ARM Cortex A5 processor with a 256KB L2 cache. It is equipped with a 400MHz 32bit LPDDR2 memory, which supplies 3.2GB bandwidth for low-cost mobile devices.

It supports WiFi, Bluetooth, and GPS connections through various peripheral interfaces. It also leverages a dedicated CPU, accelerator and memory for the WCDMA/EDGE modem sub-system to further improve performance of the application processor.

Its video processor, meanwhile, streams 720p H.264 video at 30fps, and is combined with Vivante Corporation's integrated 3D GPU for high-end graphic interface and gaming capabilities.