Freescale Semiconductor Debuts QorIQ Qonverge Multimode Platform Based New SoCs

Freescale Semiconductor (News - Alert) announced that it is sampling the first “base station-on-chip” products built on its innovative QorIQ Qonverge multimode platform.

In a release Scott Aylor, director and general manager of Freescale’s Wireless Access Division said, “Availability of the first QorIQ Qonverge products is a milestone for the wireless industry, which is in dire need of innovative new solutions to address challenging power requirements and exploding demand for additional bandwidth.”

“Freescale’s QorIQ Qonverge portfolio offers unprecedented scalability and software compatibility, giving customers flexibility, reduced cost and design-time savings as they move up to larger capacity systems,” Aylor added.

Company sources added that the new QorIQ Qonverge PSC9132 system-on-chip (SoC) for picocell and PSC9130/31 SoCs for femtocell base stations is based on a single, scalable architecture. This is capable of supporting multiple air interfaces so that operators and OEMs can make integrated heterogeneous solutions suitable for future applications.

It is imperative that such solutions are able to reduce power consumption, cost and design time. The QorIQ Qonverge portfolio enables a scalable line of processors that are built on the same architecture that is suitable for small- to large-cell base stations.

Also it was revealed that the platform allows OEMs to reuse software irrespective of cell size. All customers can benefit by using common hardware, software architecture and tools thereby bringing down costs. Such a comprehensive solution reduces time to market.

Freescale’s first available QorIQ Qonverge processors are the PSC9130/31 femtocell SoCs that can be used for eight to 16 simultaneous users and PSC9132 picocell/enterprise SoC devices that can be used for up to 100 simultaneous users.

According to officials these processors can support various air interfaces such as LTE (News - Alert) (FDD/TDD), WCDMA (HSPA+), WiMAX, UMTS and CDMA. The devices feature glueless RFIC communication and antennae interfaces, hence more chips such as FPGAs are not required. This reduces board space and cost.

The ultra-integrated PSC913x family supports GPS synchronization and 2G/3G sniffing in a single device.

Freescale created the new SoCs based on Power Architecture cores that incorporates programmable StarCore digital signal processor (DSP) technology and powerful baseband hardware acceleration engines. The StarCore SC3850 DSP and Power Architecture e500 MPU cores and the new QorIQ Qonverge SoCs differ in the offloading Layer 2 processing, explained officials.

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