LONDON—Cognovo Ltd, a 2009 startup focused on developing SDMs (software-defined modems) for 4G communications, is planning to demonstrate carrier aggregation communications in real-time on an LTE Advanced baseband at the Mobile World Congress, which opens in Barcelona on Monday Feb. 27.
The demonstration will comprise a 3GPP Release 10 LTE Advanced downlink run over the MCE160 software-defined baseband that Cognovo had manufactured by Samsung Electronics Co Ltd on a 45-nm CMOS process technology. The chip has been relabeled CDC160 by Cognovo. Rohde & Schwarz are providing the SMU200A Vector Signal Generator, the EX-IQ-BOX Digital Interface Module and the FSW Signal and Spectrum Analyzer to support the demonstration.
The SMU200A will provide a 3GPP release 10 compliant carrier aggregation signal where two 20-MHz bandwidth OFDM carriers are decoded simultaneously by the MCE160 chip to achieve a data bandwidth equivalent to 40-MHz.
Carrier aggregation is important because it allows operators to s scale communications across contiguous and non-contiguous bands and to exploit spectrum efficiently and dynamically. Several carriers have already announced deployment as early as next year, Cognovo said.
Pascal Herczog, CTO at Cognovo said: "LTE Advanced significantly increases the complexity of the UE baseband and many developers have signalled that a new design approach is necessary. Carrier aggregation requires n parallel LTE downlink streams to be processed simultaneously and in a traditional ASIC design, this dramatically increases both silicon cost (die size) and power consumption. The front-end modem also becomes more complex with enhanced MIMO schemes and ICIC [inter cell interference co-ordination]. We see many people now moving to our software modem platform in order to address this. Parallel data processing tasks run efficiently on our distributed multi-processor architecture. The result is lower clock speed, power consumption and die size as all resources can be fully re-used from frame to frame."
Herczog also said: "Bringing any new wireless standard to market presents a significant engineering challenge, since reliable test equipment and a real time platform are both needed early on in the program, to move beyond simulation models and explore real-world performance and optimization."
The demonstration is being staged at the Rohde & Schwarz booth which is 1E51 in Hall 1.
This story as originally posted by EE Times.
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