At the Mobile World Congress here, the FPGA specialist is demonstrating a baseband targeted design platform (TDP) the company says significantly reduces the bill of materials and power consumption of baseband processing compared to that achieved with conventional design approaches.

The demonstration works with Xilnx Virtex-5 FPGAs and access packet processors from Wintegra, but Mark Quartermain, wireless marketing manager at Xilinx told EE Times Europe that the development deal is not an exclusive one targeting baseband and MAC architectures for Layer 2, and that the company could work on projects with other processor vendors.

Development of much of the IP and application software for the baseband and other aspects of the targeted development platform was done at Xilinx's design centre in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Quartermain stressed Xilinx sees this as a strategic development project.

"We have invested in building up wireless systems level expertise internally, which gives us a significant advantage over most of our competitors who tend to license the technology externally. Developing in house helps us to react faster, and develop better products."

Xilinx already has announced digital front end platform for LTE that incorporates logic for dial up conversion, digital down conversion and crest factor reduction for the LTE radio subsystem. It plans to offer an end-to-end LTE basestation design encompassing radio, baseband (MAC and PHY) and transport functions.

The scalable platform being demonstrated here incorporates Virtex-5 FPGAs and Wintegra's WinPath-2 family of access packet processors and software to provide a complete digital baseband and transport solution for 4G radio standards, including both time division duplex (TDD) and frequency division duplex (FDD) modes of LTE.

Quartermain said the TDP can use Xilinx's Virtex-6 range of FPGA's or its Spartan range of devices for more cost effective solutions, and on the processor side Wintegra's Win-Path-3 parts.

The aim is to deliver flexibility for both channel cards and network interface transport cards to address the full range of basestation (eNodeB) implementations from enterprise femtocells to multi-sector macro basestation form factors.

The group is also collaborating with Agilent for 3GPP-LTE signal generation and test validation, to ensure standards compliance and interoperability.

The initial release of the LTE baseband TDP with prototypes using WinPath-2 silicon and Xilinx Virtex-5 FXT FPGAs is targeted for completion in May 2009. Designs based on the new WinPath-3 and Xilinx Virtex-6 devices will be available in the fourth quarter of 2009.

Xilinx says the software-defined nature of the platform enables basestation developers to 'future-proof' their products, and the open framework facilitates integration of custom intellectual property components enabling developers to differentiate their products.

The reprogrammable and reconfigurable architecture of the platform also makes it possible for operators to undertake field software upgrades without expensive hardware improvements or replacement programs.

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