US : QIDT (Integrated Device Technology, Inc.) announced its second generation pre-processing switch, the PPS Gen 2, an innovative, off-the-shelf solution that addresses the interconnect and acceleration needs of 3G and beyond. Leveraging the serial RapidIO® (sRIO) interconnect standard, and offering a reduced port count together with a richer feature set, the PPS Gen 2 is optimized for the support of smaller DSP clusters that are commonly used in micro and pico base stations. The IDT PPS family now provides the needed scalability and flexibility to move up and down across a range of base station applications, enabling a high degree of hardware and software reuse. Today, customers can deploy the modular, low cost, scalable and flexible macro, micro, and pico stations for the cost-effective proliferation of 3G communications.

Moving well beyond simple sRIO switches, IDT has integrated advanced endpoint processing capabilities with high-performance switch fabrics to provide much of the “standard” functionality currently implemented in expensive FPGAs or ASICs. The PPS family reflects IDT intrinsic baseband knowledge originating from decade-long relationships between IDT, its industry-leading base station customers, and leading third-party component providers. The PPS family boosts base station performance by up to 20 percent by offloading DSPs, FPGAs, or ASICs of particular bandwidth-intensive tasks. While freeing the DSPs to execute higher value-added and differentiating algorithms, the PPS Gen 2 also speeds time to market and reduces cost.

“Deployment of these scalable base stations is essential to the proliferation of 3G – and analysts forecast these stations will capture 80 percent of the base station market. Scalable base stations use a modular architecture to tailor capacity to the user population. For example, micro stations provide denser coverage in heavily-populated areas, while pico stations serve to avoid gaps in coverage. And both do so more cost-effectively than deploying additional macro base stations,” said Thomas Brenner, vice president and general manager for the IDT Flow-control Management division. “For 3G and beyond, generic and custom switching options alone cannot meet the data acceleration needs and reduced cost requirements of these scalable base stations. This is why we developed the PPS Gen 2.”

About IDT Pre-processing Solutions

The PPS Gen 2 optimally distributes data to multiple DSPs to increase performance, supporting four pre-processing blocks via three 4x ports or up to twelve 1x ports, with flexibility to connect among 4x and 1x ports. Each port can be configured for 3.125 Gbaud, 2.5 Gbaud, or 1.25 Gbaud. By comparison, the PPS Gen 1, targeted at macro base stations, supports 10 pre-processing blocks via 10 4x ports or up to 22 1x ports. Both PPS solutions implement standard sRIO switching operations, with the additional ability to execute critical endpoint tasks, such as byte- and packet-level data manipulations, and other mathematical and memory management operations. This significant offloading of baseband processing clusters delivers higher performance while reducing cost, power consumption, and design complexity. It also eliminates a great deal of the risk inherent in designing custom solutions to address the pre-processing bottleneck.

The PPS Gen 2 provides even more endpoint functionality than the IDT PPS Gen 1 device, including unique enhancements for supporting system bring-up and debug operations, as well as richer pre-processing operations, such as multiply/accumulate. While designed with baseband processing in mind, the PPS solutions have proven invaluable in addressing DSP cluster requirements across a range of embedded applications, including medical and military imaging, as well as compute and storage applications.

Hardware/Software Development Kits Ease Evaluation and Design-In

The PPS solutions are supported by ATCA- and MicroATCA-compatible dedicated development platforms, designed in conjunction with Texas Instruments, together with a comprehensive range of software development tools, such as GUI, API, drivers and 3rd party tools. Each kit supports all other IDT pre-processing solutions and sRIO-enabled solutions such as the 10G Serial Buffer, and enables the designer to tune system and component configurations to meet system requirements. Moreover, to ensure that each system design is optimized for production and meets its time to market objectives, IDT provides customers with extensive collaborative support, including system modeling and signal integrity analyses, and schematic and layout review services.

Pricing and Availability

The PPS Gen 2 - 80KSW0001 - is available in the same RoHS 676-ball BGA 27 mm x 27 mm flip-chip package as the PPS Gen 1, providing a pin- and software-compatible migration path up and down within the PPS family. The PPS Gen 2 is also available in a RoHS 324-ball BGA 19 mm x 19 mm, reducing package size in space-constrained applications. The PPS Gen 2 is currently sampling and is priced at $55 in 10,000 unit quantities.