Breakthrough Power Efficiency for 3G/3.5G Wireless Base Station Radios

US Calif. : Altera Corporation announced a jointly-developed radio card, TC8201, that dramatically increases power amplifier (PA) efficiency when compared with analog feed-forward-based systems. The TC8201 radio card increases PA efficiency by up to 300 percent, reducing cost, cooling and maintenance requirements in new 3G/3.5G base station designs.

The TelASIC TC8201 Transmit Linearization Subsystemis commercially available to OEMs building multi-channel power amplifier, remote or integrated radio heads.

It can be tailored for air-interface, including high-speed downlink packet access (HSDPA), W-CDMA, evolution data optimized (EV-DO), Code Division Multiple Access 2000 (CDMA2000), frequency (800 MHz, 1.7 GHz, 1.9 GHz, 2.1 GHz, 2.5 GHz, etc.), number of carries (1-4 for HSDPA/W-CDMA, 1-15 for CDMA2000/EV-DO), output power and interface to the baseband card (Open Base Station Architecture Initiative (OBSAI), Common Public Radio Interface (CPRI), RapidIO(TM), digital I&Q. The TC8201 uses Altera(R) FPGAs, HardCopy(R) structured ASICs and Nios(R) embedded processors.

"Our business model relied on Altera's HardCopy structured ASICs for power and cost efficiency," said Ashis Khan, vice president of sales and marketing for TelASIC. "Altera's programmable technologies let us rapidly and securely deliver this well-differentiated product while retaining the flexibility to meet changing customer requirements. These advantages have been critical to supporting our customers who demand standards compliance and the highest levels of quality, reliability and supply chain stability."

Ready-to-Use Development Systems

Also available to speed OEM system designs are the TC0003, a digital pre-distortion (DPD)-friendly PA test and development system, and TC0007, a CPRI development system. They are compliant with both the CPRI standard to meet industry demand for remote radio heads and the standardization of base station architecture, thus lowering overall development and deployment costs.

Expanding the Wireless Ecosystem

TelASIC is part of Altera's wireless ecosystem for system OEMs. It includes Altera design solutions as well as products from partners such as TelASIC. Altera's wireless portfolio includes individual functions for critical elements of the digital radio such as crest factor reduction, digital predistortion, digital down conversion and digital up conversion, as well as CPRI and OBSAI interfaces. TelASIC provides a complete, tested transmit/transceiver radio subsystem merging these elements with their own intellectual property (IP), with flexibility to support any PA and any air interface. In total, these offerings address any wireless OEM's desire to rapidly develop either their own solution or purchase a complete, off-the-shelf one.

"Partnering with TelASIC lets Altera offer the industry's strongest, most comprehensive portfolio of solutions for developers of next-generation 3G wireless infrastructure equipment," said Arun Iyengar, senior director of Altera's wireless business unit. "As a valuable addition to our expanding wireless ecosystem, TelASIC brings an impressive knowledge of RF algorithms and systems engineering to our mutual customers. This is demonstrated by the market acceptance of their Altera-enabled solution by major wireless OEMs, as previously announced with Panasonic Mobile Communications. The strength of our approach is offering systems manufacturers a make-or-buy choice. They can apply our wireless ingredients to develop their own design or go immediately to market with ones from our partners." See www.telasic.com/live/press/10.19.2005.shtml for more information about the TelASIC and Panasonic announcement.

Price and Availability

The TC8201 Transmit Linearization Subsystem sample boards are priced at $5,000. For TC8201 volume pricing, please contact sales@telasic.com with specific configuration information. The TelASIC TC0003 DPD-friendly PA test and development system is priced at $35,000. The TC0007 CPRI development system is priced at $3,500. All are available now.

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