Arctic Semiconductor, formerly SiTune Corporation, a developer of low-power, universal RF chipsets, announced that its IceWings RF transceiver is powering a new universal 5G small cell infrastructure platform from ODM Compal Electronics. Arctic recently rebranded from SiTune to better reflect its focus on 5G RF products.
Claimed as the industry’s first open ecosystem small cell platform, the Compal 5G platform leverages the IceWings RFIC integrated with NXP Semiconductors’ Layerscape Access LA12xx programmable baseband processor. The combination is said to deliver “the highest performance at the lowest power consumption” at a competitive cost. It also surpasses 3GPP standard requirements.
Compal’s 5G small cell infrastructure platform (Source: Arctic Semiconductor)
“The introduction of this universal small cell platform is a pivotal point in 5G infrastructure development, allowing 5G coverage to scale anywhere and everywhere at an exponentially faster pace,” said Vahid Toosi, CEO of Arctic Semiconductor, in a statement.
The new infrastructure platform can operate at any 5G FR1 frequency bands from 600 MHz to 7.2 GHz. The 4×4 MIMO solution supports throughputs beyond Gbits/s speeds. It enables customers worldwide to develop cost-optimized, low-power 5G small cells and O-RAN radio units for a variety of applications including all-in-one or distributed networks in public or private bands, said the company.
IceWings RF transceiver (Source: Arctic Semiconductor)
The IceWings RFIC with four integrated transmitters and receivers supports a range of standards in signal frequencies below 7.2 GHz. The new silicon is based on an advanced CMOS process node, which offers high performance with RF enhancements for both 5G sub-7 GHz and mmWave infrastructure.
Compal selected the IceWings design because it allows the company to build a smaller platform that consumes a lot less power. JS Liang, Compal’s vice president also said: “IceWings is fully integrated, compatible with NXP baseband processors, covers multiple 5G frequency bands, and is fully programmable while meeting 3GPP specifications.”
The small cell system is based on NXP’s Layerscape multicore Arm SoC with the new LA12xx software defined radio, supporting high throughput transmission and reception and complex digital functions including digital pre-distortion. The highly integrated IceWings RFIC delivers the four transmit and four receive paths via a glue-less interface directly to NXP’s LA12xx baseband processor, said Arctic.
The IceWings 5G chipset is in full production. The Compal platform will be demonstrated at Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2023 in Barcelona.
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