Freescale Semiconductor Introduces Two Next-Generation Products of MSC8156 DSP

Freescale Semiconductor unveiled two next-generation products, claiming that these products deliver more than twice the throughput of their industry-leading predecessor. Called MSC8157 and MSC8158, the new products are the next generation of MSC8156 DSP. Company officials said that the new DSPs are based on Freescale’s (News - Alert) SC3850 core running at 1.2 Ghz.

Company officials said that the new products help lower bill of materials costs by integrating technologies that eliminate the need for additional, costly ASICs and FPGAs required in competing solutions.

The MSC8157 product supports a broad array of 3G and 4G wireless standards, while the MSC8158 is cost-optimized, enabling efficient and higher throughput deployments for WCDMA networks.

“With the introduction of the MSC8157/58 product family, Freescale leverages its deep understanding of wireless networking technology to address the needs of service providers to dramatically reduce network costs while increasing bandwidth,” said Lisa Su, senior vice president and general manager of Networking and Multimedia Group at Freescale, in a press release.

Su said that these new products balance leadership performance, cost and energy efficiency to meet the needs of next-generation 3G/4G networks.

Freescale’s newest DSPs come with an enhanced version of its MAPLE-B baseband accelerator. Company officials said that the flexible MAPLE-B2 accelerator packs a high level of throughput in a small area of silicon.

Additionally, both the newest offerings offload many mathematical and baseband intensive tasks to the enhanced MAPLE-B2 block, freeing the processors’ six cores to handle other tasks.

Company officials said that MSC8157 delivers the peak throughput possible in 3G-LTE (News - Alert) 20 MHz bandwidth, delivering 300 Mbps in the downlink and 150 Mbps in the uplink, with 4x4 DL and 2x4 UL MiMO, and also various interference cancellation schemes.

Moreover, the DSP also supports multiple WCDMA sectors of 42 Mbps in the downlink and 11 Mbps in the uplink, together with multi-mode simultaneous operation of 3G-LTE and WCDMA.

Plus, the MSC8157 incorporates a high speed DDR interface, ample internal memory, Common Public Radio Interface (CPRI) 6G antenna interfaces and two Serial-RapidIO (News - Alert) Gen 2, enabling 5G per lane with sophisticated messaging capability.

Both MSC8157 and MSC8158 DSPs include advanced WCDMA Chiprate acceleration, eliminating OEMs’ need to develop their own ASIC or FPGA, said company officials.

Freescale plans to sample the MSC8157/58 DSPs to selected customers in 1Q 2011.

Earlier this month, the company introduced comprehensive silicon and software solution.