Freescale:One-chip Base Stations Are The Future

Freescale has launched a “base-station-on-a-chip”, designed to simplify operators’ roll-out of 4G networks, and maybe establish a world where base stations are more closely matched to the phones they serve.

The announcement was made at Mobile World Congress, although the product has already been on show as a key part of Alcatel-Lucent’s lightRadio plan to make smaller cell-towers. Freescale claims to have the first end-to-end solution for multiple network standards from femtocells up to macro cells – although Texas Instruments is threatening to compete.

Rebalancing the network

How important is the move to smaller base stations, and aren’t femtocell makers already addressing the need for miniaturisation? We met Lisa Su, senior vice presiden of networking at Freescale, at the Alcatel Lucent launch last week, and asked her.

“Yes, femtocells are simple,” she said. “They address eight users or sixteen users, and you don’t need a lot of processing power for it. There are no solutions that can offer femto pico and macro cells with the same base station architecture. We can scale from thousands of users down to a home femtocell.”

The Freescale Qonverge family – due to be delivered in the second half of this year – combines an IBM/Freescale SPower processor, along with digital signal processors, and floating point gate arrays (FPGAs) that have previously been on separate chips. “What we offer now is the integration of all the functions.”

One way to look at the miniaturisation of base stations is a “rebalancing” of the network, with cell base stations catching up with the sophistication of client devices, eWEEK suggested.

Su agreed. “The infrastructure has not kept up with cleint devices,” she said, explaining that sophisticated phones are currently talking through to very large clumsy antenna systems on the ground.

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