Base station processor handles advanced LTE

The QorIQ Qonverge B3421 base station SoC features an advanced digital front-end that improves power amplifier efficiency and significantly reduces base station power and costs. The device meets the more stringent power, size and cost requirements of enterprise macr- and pico-cell wireless base stations and is fully optimized for concurrent LTE and WiFi operation.

The IC has two dual-thread 64-bit Power Architecture cores, and two cores based on a StarCore flexible vector processor (FVP), plus low latency hardware accelerators for security  and the entire radio processing chain, from transport to PHY layers. The four cores each have 32 Kbyte I and D caches. The SoC also has support for JESD204B, JESD207, and CPRI interfaces, Power over Ethernet, PCI Express, SATA 2.0, and Ethernet SGMII backhaul interfaces. It needs just 10 W for 256 users and is said to be the most highly integrated metrocell SoC in the industry. Prototypes Q1 2015.