Mobile Technology
Hitting a moving target
P
hilip Solis, an analyst at ABI Research, covering the wireless industry once said of the ever-changing landscape of next-generation technology: “When one refers to 4G as a standard, one loses all credibility to argue what 4G is.” Indeed, the catch-all term ‘4G’ includes an alphabet soup of protocols and approaches, so product developers and service providers find it more convenient to have a single label to attach to their products. For now, 4G is an easy enough way to distinguish from 3G. But, of course, 4G throws a wide blanket over a range of technologies – TD-LTE, TD-LTE-A, HSPA+, WiMAX. And, most developers implement these technologies in an incremental way, giving rise to products that, although they may be marketed as 4G, are really 3.5 or 3.75G.
The dynamic nature of advanced wireless applications makes programmability a must, as Eyal Bergman explains
24 February 2012
All of this creates a moving target for chip designers, who must also deal with a myriad of local nuances to meet specific market requirements, not to mention the need to have multiple versions of the same design to offer a variety of feature sets. A major challenge for the chip companies supplying 4G solutions is that operators’ requirements worldwide vary and depend on multiple factors including: geography, legacy network, new
Components in Electronics
standards rollout plans, customer base, regulation, competition and more. About the only thing that is certain is that without a platform that is flexible, designers will spend needless time and money re-doing their work and market opportunities will be lost.
Programmability That is why programmable technologies and platforms have replaced the traditional fixed-architecture approaches of previous generations. It is not just true in wireless, but in any application area where change is constant and standards are still evolving. Chip design in today’s market is all about the software. Companies no longer can differentiate on the underlying manufacturing processes since they are sourcing the silicon from the same set of suppliers. The competitive edge is in how that process is tuned with software to bring unique value to the market – whether that’s in feature sets, costs, or performance of the chip.
This type of fluidity in the market has led chip vendors in the wireless space to look into a programmable approach that offers multimode system support and can replace multiple dedicated hardwired blocks. This approach forms the basis for the growing move toward Software
Define Radio (SDR) technologies. As LTE and other flavours of 4G gain traction, the need for high flexibility will be even greater as LTE chips will be integrated with 3G legacy chips, not to mention the next evolution towards LTE-A and beyond. SDR provides a single programmable platform that can be used to support multiple air interfaces without the need for chip replacements.
Despite the need to satisfy multiple and divergent technology needs, the key to success in SDR will lie in providing developers with a single architecture on which to base all the incarnations of a provider’s design. A common processor architecture that can be easily programmed allows suppliers to target any of the major markets, each of which has its own legacy standards that need to be supported. In the next generation wireless market, for example, using traditional hardwired design methodologies would require three different processor architectures to be developed for each of the markets: Europe (legacy HSPA and GSM/GPRS), China (legacy TD-SCDMA and GSM/GPRS) and US (legacy EV-DO and CDMA). Using a more flexible but single- architecture approach simplifies future development, lowers cost and enables
www.cieonline.co.uk
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48