Wireless DSP devices for base-station PHY and MAC

Designed to address the growing market for small-cell and femtocell-based applications, the OCT2224W wireless devices are based on the company's second-generation asynchronous Opus DSP architecture (Opus2).

Leveraging both the low-power characteristics and the high performance of the Opus DSP core, the OCT2224W allows more processing power to be packed into a lower-cost device, according to Octasic.

The OCT2224W performs LTE PHY and MAC for a 20MHz 2 x 2 BTS at 3W.

With Opus Studio, an integrated development environment, the OCT2224W is fully programmable and includes 24 high-performance Opus2 DSPs cores.

This homogeneous architecture simplifies application partitioning and allows coarse grain parallelism, while its programmable hardware accelerators support today's cellular standards and are flexible enough to support revisions to future standards.

'The OCT2224W offers developers a common-platform multi-core DSP solution that can not only span multiple wireless standards but can also scale from small base stations to large ones,' said Emmanuel Gresset, the company's vice-president of software-defined radio (SDR).

Stephane Teral, principal analyst of Service Provider Mobile and FMC Infrastructure at Infonetics, added: 'The OCT2224W device can offer both scalability and true multi-standard support.

'This allows customers to develop a single low-power platform that encompasses multiple air interfaces and scales with base-station cell size while using a single code base per standard,' she said.

The OCT2224W device incorporates a set of input/output (I/O) interfaces and an optional ARM core.

The device provides an ideal platform for base stations of all sizes and for all air interfaces, including low-power base stations for rural areas, macro base stations, outdoor small-cell base stations and indoor high-traffic and enterprise femtocells.

Octasic provides PHY software libraries that offer standard compliant GSM, Edge, WCDMA, HSPA+ and LTE functionality.

For example, an OCT2224W device can implement a complete multi-standard picocell that can provide LTE, Wimax, HSPA+, Edge or any other commercial wireless standard on a single hardware platform.