CEVA, Inc. has introduced PentaG, a comprehensive 5G intellectual property (IP) platform for enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB). Compliant to the 3GPP 5G New Radio (NR) Release-15 and software upgradable for Release-16, PentaG is targeted at smartphones, fixed wireless access and the many other embedded devices that can take advantage of multi-gigabit data rates to enable services and use cases such as 4K video streaming, augmented reality, virtual reality, autonomous driving and home broadband.
PentaG builds on CEVA’s two decades of experience in developing DSP platforms for 2G, 3G and 4G LTE modem design, which have been licensed and deployed by many of the world’s leading wireless communications semiconductor companies and smartphone OEMs. To date, more than 8 billion handsets have shipped worldwide powered by CEVA DSPs.
To address the massive performance and technical challenges associated with 5G processing and deliver a comprehensive solution for its customers, PentaG was designed as CEVA’s most advanced set of technologies ever for a baseband architecture. It includes a unique combination of specialized scalar and vector DSP processors with an enhanced 5G instruction set architecture (ISA), specialized co-processors, accelerators, software and other essential IP blocks, in a highly configurable and modular architecture. Included in PentaG is an innovative AI processor that takes advantage of machine learning techniques to deliver up to 8X performance improvement for link adaptation workloads, compared to the conventional software approach. In addition, due to the array of specialized co-processors and accelerators, such as Vector MAC Unit (VMU), PentaG achieves up to 50% power savings for commonly used workloads, all within the low latency constraints and extreme throughput requirements of 5G NR.
Michael Boukaya, vice president and general manager of the wireless business unit at CEVA, commented: “The 5G standard poses immense challenges for wireless semiconductor designers to build modems that are powerful, yet efficient enough to meet the strict power budget constraints of enhanced mobile broadband. We designed PentaG to overcome the limitations of conventional DSP-based LTE/LTE-Advanced architectures, which simply do not scale to support 5G. The PentaG platform is powerful enough to support the most critical 5G NR functions in the most efficient manner possible, while offering the flexibility to allow customers to combine specific PentaG components with their incumbent technologies.”
PentaG supports the full gamut of 5G eMBB use cases, including standalone (SA) and non-standalone (NSA), mmWave and sub-6 GHz. The platform sustains an impressive bit-rate of up to 10Gbps and offers a scalable architecture to support most advanced wireless technologies like Massive-MIMO, beamforming and complex link adaptation schemes.
Additionally, customers can take advantage of the PentaG modular architecture to combine their incumbent technologies together with PentaG components for differentiated design and fast time-to-market. CEVA offers the option to license the full PentaG platform or its individual components, which can be integrated into their modem design via standard interfaces.
PentaG will be available for licensing to select customers in the second quarter of 2018 and for general licensing in the third quarter of 2018. For more information on PentaG, visit: https://www.ceva-dsp.com/product/ceva-pentag.
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