LTE gateway reference design based on Mindspeed and Sequans' chips
Date: 04/06/2013
Mindspeed Technologies and Sequans Communications S.A. have collaborated to deliver fully integrated Category-4 LTE fixed wireless gateway reference design for broadband access and other connected home services. The solution feature LTE baseband chip from Sequans and the Comcerto 2000 communications processor from Mindspeed.
"LTE in fixed mode has been an important element of many countries' universal broadband plans, as a more flexible alternative to DSL which can also support mobility," said Caroline Gabriel, research director at Maravedis-Rethink. "However, we are also seeing some carriers looking to replace ageing DSL networks with LTE, where a fiber upgrade would be impractical or too expensive. Reference designs will be important to reduce cost and time-to-market for this valuable carrier option."
With dual 1.2GHz ARM Cortex-A9 processors, the carrier-grade Comcerto 2000 solution supports voice-over LTE (VoLTE) and IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) frameworks. The products use intelligent offloading engines that enable Gigabit class networking to run concurrently with the Cat-4 LTE link, while leaving plenty of CPU headroom for user applications such as JVM/OSGI bundles. Comcerto 2000 LTE routers easily support simultaneous 2Gbps IPv6 NAT routing, firewall, IPSec and 1.2Gbps Wi-Fi.
"Mindspeed has a strong market presence in fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) applications and their Comcerto 2000 chip combines perfectly with our LTE chipset to deliver a high-performance, feature-rich solution," said Craig Miller, vice president, worldwide marketing, Sequans. "We enable carriers to offer residential and small business users multiple rich services, including internet access, video streaming, and VoLTE, over the LTE network."
Sequans' SQN3120 Mont Blanc LTE baseband chip provides the LTE connectivity in the joint solution. The SQN3120 is Verizon Wireless certified and is 3GPP Release 9 and GCF compliant. It is one of the few LTE chips in the industry capable of delivering full Category-4 LTE throughput of up to 150 Mbps. It supports both Time Division Duplex (TDD) and Frequency Division Duplex (FDD) modes. The chip is one of Sequans' StreamrichLTE solutions for the design of high-performance, feature-rich LTE devices. In addition to delivering Category-4 LTE throughput, SQN3120 supports gigabit Ethernet and provides Sequans AIR (active interference rejection) technology, a powerful interference mitigation algorithm that has been shown to increase throughput up to 3.5 times for users at the cell edge and to increase network capacity up to 2 times.
"Sequans and Mindspeed's LTE gateway solution provides a compelling alternative to DSL or fiber," said Laurent Hendrichs, senior product line manager at Mindspeed. "With the 150 Mbps download speeds enabled by Sequans' LTE technology, our joint reference design offers an effective alternative to wireline broadband wherever wireline access is unavailable or where VDSL or FTTH are too expensive to deploy."
A live demo showcasing the integrated solution delivering 150/50Mbps throughput, concurrent 2Gbps speed networking, up to 6000 DMIPS available for Wi-Fi 11ac, OSGI, JVM or Android will be presented by Mindspeed in booth D0719 at Computex Taipei from June 4-8, 2013 at the Taipei World Trade Center in Taipei, Taiwan.
