Cavium, Inc., announced the latest addition to its OCTEON Fusion-M portfolio of wireless infrastructure processors.
As radio networks increasingly use higher frequency bands, the demand for high output, high user count micro cells with full macro BTS capabilities at significantly lower cost of deployment has increased dramatically, not just for traditional infill use but also for providing densification in urban areas or in public host neutral applications.
Operators are seeing increased need for low cost, low power micro basestations, providing coverage in sparse deployments like small towns and rural areas in both developed and emerging economies. Unlike historical attempts at small cell offerings, the OCTEON Fusion-M microcell technology is directly derived from the larger full featured macro cell SoCs. The OCTEON Fusion-M family is fully featured and software compatible allowing excellent re-use.
The continuous and relentless increase in data traffic and the ever increasing demands for increased data rates for end users will impact how cellular networks are deployed in the future. Providing high system capacity and high per-user data rates – requirements critical for the creation of a 5G network – will require a densification of the radio access network or the deployment of additional network nodes. Increases in the number of cells will allow the traffic per square-meter to be increased resulting in a significant improvement in achievable data rates.
The OCTEON Fusion-M CNF73xx processors are single-chip solutions for micro BTS, Digital DAS and Host Neutral applications, for full L1-L7 processing on a single SoC. The CNF73xx is an entry level, scaled down version of the OCTEON Fusion CNF75xx product, delivering the lowest power per user for this class of radio cell. The key features include highly optimized full custom processor cores, a highly efficient caching subsystem, high memory bandwidth and a very flexible and high-performance PHY. They also include a host of high speed I/O configurations and innovative wireless specific hardware accelerators providing high throughput system radio performance along with very high user counts.
Feature highlights:
- Highly integrated multi-protocol single chip 4 sector 8T8R MIMO with up to 4 cores running up to 1.2 GHz core frequency
- A range of user counts from 512 to 1,024 simultaneous active users
- Multi-Protocol (LTE/LTE-A/LTE-U/WCDMA/GSM) (LTE Rel 12) SoC
- Fully configurable Wireless Baseband Module based on VLIW DSP cores, comprehensive PHY hardware accelerators, custom XBAR and PHY Shared memory
- Hardware Beam Forming
- Integrated I/O capacity including JESD207P/JESD204B,10GE, SGMII, PCIe v3.0
The new CNF73xx family offers simultaneous multi-sector, multi-protocol support with very flexible antenna mapping. As part of its many advanced features the CNF73xx family also provides native beam-forming hardware support as well as a range of RF interfaces for external high output radios.
“Cavium has taken its successful OCTEON Fusion-M technology and retooled it at a rapidly growing market,” said Jag Bolaria, Principal Analyst of the Linley Group. “The need for densification of networks is apparent and this new offering provides operators another solution in their portfolio on the path to 5G in the future.”
“The OCTEON Fusion-M CNF73xx provides a very cost effective solution for operators to deploy both host neutral or high capacity outdoor micro BaseStations to build out their existing networks,” said Raj Singh, VP of Cavium’s Network and Communications Group. “We continue to focus on baseband processor innovation, software integration and cost-efficient hardware platform designs in response to emerging market needs.”
The OCTEON Fusion-M CNF73xx family of processors along with a range of hardware reference platforms are sampling now to select customers.
Leave a Reply