Octasic Introduces New Multi-Core DSP Device for Wireless Baseband

Designed to address the rapidly growing market for small cell and femtocell-based applications, Octasic’s latest wireless devices are based on the second generation of its unique asynchronous Opus DSP architecture (Opus2). Leveraging both the low power characteristics and the high performance of the Opus DSP core, the OCT2224W allows more processing power to be packed into a lower cost device. The OCT2224W performs LTE PHY and MAC for a 20MHz 2x2 BTS at an unprecedented 3 Watts.

With Opus Studio, an integrated development environment, the OCT2224W is fully programmable and includes 24 high-performance Opus2 DSPs Cores. This homogeneous architecture simplifies application partitioning and allows coarse grain parallelism, while its highly programmable hardware accelerators support both today’s cellular standards and are flexible enough to support revisions to future standards.

“The OCT2224W offers developers a common platform multi-core DSP solution that can not only span multiple wireless standards but can also scale from small basestations to large ones,” said Emmanuel Gresset, vice president of software defined radio (SDR) at Octasic. “We’ve designed our OCT2224W device with flexibility in mind, while maintaining the highest performance and the lowest power, a tradition at Octasic that clearly differentiates our products and those of our customers.”

“The OCT2224W device can offer both scalability and true multi-standard support. This allows customers to develop a single low-power platform that encompasses multiple air interfaces and scales with basestation cell size while using a single code base per standard,” said Stéphane Téral, principal analyst, Service Provider Mobile and FMC Infrastructure at Infonetics.

The OCT2224W device incorporates a rich set of I/O interfaces and an optional ARM core. This device provides an ideal platform for basestations of all sizes and for all air interfaces, including low-power basestations for rural areas, macro basestations, outdoor small-cell basestations, and indoor high-traffic and enterprise femtocells. Octasic provides PHY software libraries that offer standard compliant GSM, EDGE, WCDMA, HSPA+, and LTE functionality. For example, an OCT2224W device can implement a complete multi-standard picocell that can provide LTE, WiMAX, HSPA+, EDGE, or any other commercial wireless standard on a single hardware platform.

Features of the OCT2224W for wireless include:

* 24 Opus2 DSP cores able to process up to 64 HSPA+ or LTE users on a single device
* Up to three native radio interfaces for MIMO and simultaneous air interfaces
* Serial Rapid IO, Gigabit Ethernet, USB, PCIe, NAND, TDM
* Integrated security features
* Multiple RF clock synchronization options
* Optional ARM processor, which can be used for small-cell basestations
* Flexible framework, which allows for customization with proprietary algorithms
* Software-programmable platform that offers easy migration path to future evolutions of Evolved EDGE, WiMAX 802.16m and LTE Advanced